Musings from the Balkans and Carpathians

A new language for political change?

2012-02-27T13:18:00.006+02:00

Where is the modern equivalent of the classic "What did you do in the war, daddy?” – to make us oldies face up to our moral responsibility for the degraded world we have allowed to develop in the past 30 years?
The last post started out as a confession – but then got sidetracked into an annotated bibiography. So let’s get back on track.
I was, in many ways, typical of an important strand of the generation which was at university in the early 60s – and which helped release the economist and managerial gene from Pandora’s box. We knew better than our parents. Everything needed to change - organisations (particularly the public ones) were outdated and needed to be shaken up in the name of managerialism. The compacency (if not self-interest) of officials needed to be challenged – whether by community activists or by market forces. I was no believer in markets – regional development, after all, was my first great passion. And I had read my Galbraith and realised how oligopolistic and manipulative our bigger companies were (although even these were being threatened in the early 80s by young, upstart companies – at least in some sectors).

It was indeed a cultural revolution if not a Reformation– with rationality being the new religion and social scientists the new priests. Trade unions were seen even in the Labour Party to which it had given birth and succoured over decades as Luddites – as part of the collectivism from which we were to be saved.

What I was trying to say in the last post was that we have allowed the worship of choice and of market forces to go too far. Too many people, of course, have been deceived into thinking that corporate power is the market. And it has been all too easy for those marketing the market (in the media) to link anything collectivist with a dangerous or depasse socialism.
So a new language seems to be needed to reassert civilised values – and perhaps it’s the language of "The Commons" some references to which I stumbled upon recently. The most interesting is a manifesto of sorts from a German -

Over the last two hundred years, the explosion of knowledge, technology, and productivity has enabled an unprecedented increase of private wealth. This has improved our quality of life in numerous ways. At the same time, however, we have permitted the depletion of resources and the dwindling of societal wealth. This is brought to our attention by current, interrelated crises in finance, the economy, nutrition, energy, and in the fundamental ecological systems of life. These crises are sharpening our awareness of the existence and importance of the commons.

What exactly are the Commons? They are the fundamental building blocks and pre-condition of our life and social wealth. They include knowledge and water, seeds and software, cultural works and the atmosphere. Commons are not just “things,” however. They are living, dynamic systems of life. They form the social fabric of a free society.
Natural commons are necessary for our survival, while social commons ensure social cohesion, and cultural commons enable us to evolve as individuals. It is imperative that we focus our personal creativity, talents, and enthusiasm on protecting and increasing our social wealth and natural commons. This will require a change in some basic structures of politics, economics, and society.

More social prosperity instead of more gross domestic product! When the economic growth curve drops and the GDP sinks, it seems threatening to us. Yet appearances deceive. The GDP merely maps production figures and monetary flows without regard for their ecological or social value; such numbers do not measure the things we truly need to live, – they may simply count their destruction. Social prosperity cannot be measured through such means. A reduction in the GDP does not necessarily signal a reduction in the real wealth of a society. Recognizing this fact widens our perspective and opens doors for new types of solutions.

More detail can be found in report of a December 2010 Conference and its proceedings; and in the papers of this site

Everything for sale?

2012-02-22T11:44:00.011+02:00

Last September, I wrote with some indignation about a Romanian journal labelling an article I wrote for them "left-wing”. Despite my work as a Labour Party Councillor in the 1970s and 1980s (the last 5 years on a full-time basis), I was always opposed to its statist bias. Put this down to the influence of Karl Popper, Ivan Illich and Paulo Freire. As a result, my main contribution to politics in the West of Scotland was to drive an agenda of support for community structures and inititatives. When the Labour party had its left-right split after its 1979 defeat, I was left feeling homeless – with neither option attracting me. And my suspicion of some attitudes in state professionalism and ambivalence about public sector trade unionism led me to view with some sympathy some of the Thatcher policies on contracting-out and privatisation of public services.

I feel, therefore, I can be fairly objective in assessing the results of the privatisation which has swept the globe in the past 30 years. With the exception of gas and electricity, I think the results have been disastrous. This post is written for open-minded readers who want some guidance on useful material on the issue - particularly from the British experience (which has, after all, been at it for 30 years now).
For how privatisation of water, social care etc have panned out I mentioned recently the Public Services International Research Unit of the University of Greenwich which has been giving great briefings on the consequences of privatisation globally for more than a decade.

Privatising the UK railways is perhaps the greatest disaster story – with subsidies to the private rail and track companies being almost three times (at constant prices) the subsidies which british Rail received – and the level of consumer comfort, convenience and satisfaction at an all-time low. Christan Wolmar is the great historian of UK rail privatisation

The English academic, Julian le Grand, was one Tony Blair’s advisers and promoter of the idea of releasing market forces into British social services such as health and education.
Perhaps the text which best captures the hopes and fears is The House of Commons Select Committee on Public Administration 2005 report - Choice, Voice and Public Services and, particularly the 190 pages of evidence it received from both sides of the ideological fence.

The most prolific writer on (and critic of) the privatisation of the british health system is Allyson Pollock – whose most recent book on the subject is NHS Inc. She also blogs occasionally about the issues. The UK government is now attempting (for England only) the most dramatic set of changes ever seen - wcich would effectively dismantle the public Health Service - here is the view of an independent peer (and medic) who was once a Minister of Health.

The role which market mechanisms do now play in education (and might further in the future) can be followed in the second volume of the House of Commons publication mentioned above. An acadenmic treatment is Education Management Organisations and the Privatisation of Public Education: A Cross-National Comparison of the USA and Britain and an angrier statement from a practitioner in Education for sale.
One of the most formidable books I have on my Sirnea bookshelves is Robert Kuttner’s Everything for Sale – the virtues and limits of markets (1996) which received the following accolade from the late economist Robert Heilbroner "I have never seen the market system better described, more intelligently appreciated, or more trenchantly criticized than in EVERYTHING FOR SALE." A New York Times review gave a useful summary of the book -

Mr. Kuttner's target is the total faith in the market-pricing system held by economists of the Chicago school (and by members of two allied scholarly movements in the fields of political science and law -- public choice and law and economics): their idea that whatever is must be optimal if it is the result of the operation of a market. More broadly, Mr. Kuttner wants to dismantle the view that markets essentially work and government interventions essentially don't. By relentlessly piling on example after detailed example of market failure and government success, he gradually makes the idea that all efforts to modulate the market are doomed seem like a blind prejudice that has been holding the nation inexplicably in its grip. If you're ever challenged to name ''just one thing'' the United States Government has ever done right, you'll be fully prepared to answer after reading ''Everything for Sale.'' There are all sorts of necessary social and economic goods, Mr. Kuttner says, that markets can't be relied upon to provide. Free markets underinvest in pure research, so government needs to finance it, or to structure the economy so that private companies can afford to conduct it. Government made us prosperous by creating the higher education system, railroads, canals, commercial aviation and the Internet. Moreover, markets generate problems -- pollution, dangerous products, economic disasters like bank failures -- so they need to be regulated. Regulation does not retard growth: ''The zenith of the era of regulation -- the postwar boom -- was the most successful period of American capitalism.'' Finally, markets fail to provide all citizens with such essentials as health care, physical safety and basic economic security, so these have to come from government.
Demonstrating an impressive mastery of a vast range of material, Mr. Kuttner lays out the case for the market's insufficiency in field after field: employment, medicine, banking, securities, telecommunications, electric power. This material isn't exactly riveting, but it is presented clearly and convincingly enough to qualify as self-improving reading matter. Then he shows, over and over, how his primary villains, academic free-market ideologues, have pushed society in the direction of abandoning carefully constructed solutions to market failures -- solutions that were working quite well.
Mr. Kuttner is an unapologetic social democrat, a believer in America's moving in the direction of a Western European or Scandinavian-style mixed economy, with a bigger Government, higher taxes and stronger unions. One of the strengths of ''Everything for Sale'' is Mr. Kuttner's complete lack of the usual tendency in journalists and policy intellectuals to keep the discussion within the frame of the political possibilities of the moment. He wants to change the debate entirely. He insistently attributes our economic problems to political, not market, failure. For example, American blue-collar workers are underpaid, he says, because it isn't skills they lack but political power. Conversely, the solution to most of the market's deficiencies is not fine-tuning but ''a redistribution of economic and political power.'' As Mr. Kuttner explains (in italics), ''There is no escape from politics

Kuttner’s book deal, however, with the economic arguments. It does not really go into the politics. For that you have to read Colin Leys’s Market-Driven Politics (2001). It was Leys who helped me understand exactly what is meant by the dreadful word "commodification” and his book shows how it started to be applied in the UK in the 1980s to such fields as health and broadcasting. Leys is actually a development economist and most of his material on the internet is therefore on that topic – although an interesting preface to a new book of his called Total Capitalism is available here

The photograph is of Loch Lomond in Central Scotland - a National Park for public benefit and therefore free from development and market forces.

Consultancy....again

2012-02-21T11:10:00.006+02:00

Eighteen months ago I highlighted a story about the English health service spending 300 million in the previous year on consultancy companies – equivalent to the pay of 10,000 nurses. This was just the tip of the iceberg – with spending on consultants having got out of control under New Labour. A 2006 book on the subject suggested that spending had gone up 10 times under them. Four reasons for this –
• New Labour’s initial suspicion of the senior civil servants who had served a radical right Conservative Government for 18 years
• a naivety about the implementation of complex IT projects (and lack of coordination on them)
• The curious combination New Labour had of managerialism and social engineering
• the jobs and connections many of the new Ministers had had with big consultancies when in opposition.

A story in today’s Guardian indicates that in New Labour’s final years, the spending increased by a factor 50 to one in one department. The Ministry of Defence apparently spent only 6 million pounds a few years ago on consultants but its bill came in at 297 million in 2010. Curiously, The Guardian tries to put the blame on the Coalition Government but, on my arithmetic, 2009.2010 was still on the New Labour watch. What will be interesting will be to see the figures for 2011 – when the present government started its programme of reducing defence manpower by 60,000.
The paper did report a few days back that government departments have spent 30 million pounds hiring temporary staff to cope with the shortage of staff they are experiencing after the redundancies of the past year.

Exactly a year ago I drew attention to the publications of the National Audit Office (NAO) on the subject. The NAO is supposed to be the nation’s financial watchdog but started to look at the issue of consultant use only in 2005. Since then it has issued various reports exposing the bad practice and issuing both recommendations, guidelines and the inevitable “toolkits”. Their last report (issued in October 2010 for the new government) gives a useful overview of issues - and one of the annexes to the significant 2007 report is a helpful set of guidelines on increasing the commitment of clients and consultants during the projects.
It’s sloppy journalism on the Guardian’s part not to give this sort of background – and follow it up eg by asking whether the NAO has been asking what use departments have been making of their guidelines.
For those interested in the consultancy business, a more analytical study of the different types of consultancy has been done by a Canadian think-tank.

On the subject of slack journalism, it is a blog in Paris which tells us here in Bucharest that several Romanians have been on a hunger strike in an attempt to get some transparency on the crimes committed during the communist era. Doru Maries is near death - having been on hunger strike for 90 days. The local media have apparently given no coverage to this.

Presidents...and presidents

2012-02-20T11:29:00.003+02:00

Yesterday I watched Sarkozy’s opening speech of the French Presidential campaign which he delivered to 10,000 faithful at Marseilles. A stirring event – like 2 previous he delivered recently before he actually declared his official candidacy. So far I haven’t seen Hollande on TV5. Both candidates are up against a strong National Front challenge – so hardly surprising that Sarkozy’s speech was virulently nationalist -

Aimer la France, c'est refuser d'accepter les 35 heures (the working week which Sarkozy has tried to break) c'est refuser de promettre la retraite à 60 ans (...) c'est refuser d'augmenter les dépenses et d'augmenter les impôts en pleine crise de la dette (...) c'est refuser d'aborder l'immigration par la seule posture idéologique", a-t-il lancé. « Quand on aime la France, on n'est pas du côté de ceux qui, pour défendre leurs intérêts, bloquent le pays et prennent les Français en otage (...) on a l'obsession de ne pas l'affaiblir (...) on dit la vérité aux Français sur ce que l'on veut faire, sinon on jette le discrédit sur la parole publique", a poursuivi le chef de l'Etat sous les applaudissements. (Liberation)

"Je me souviens qu'au début, j'ai fait de la politique parce que je voulais agir, je voulais résoudre des problèmes, je voulais aider les gens à surmonter leurs difficultés, a poursuivi le candidat de l'UMP. Mais en me tournant sur toutes ces années, j'ai compris que le combat essentiel, c'est celui que l'on mène pour le pays qui nous a vu naître. Il n' y a pas un seul combat qui soit supérieur à celui qui mène pour son pays." (Le Monde)

For a detailed assessment of the policy platforms, we have to go to a blog which actually gives us a useful insight into the socialist candidate Jean-Luc Melenchon who is also running and attracting about 8% in the polls at the moment and whose manifesto is apparently a best-seller

The German Presidency is, as they say, "honorific” – and, with both of the last 2 incumbents having to resign, there are those who suggest the post is unecessary. This is to disregard the moral authority which incumbents such as Richard von Weizsacker and Johannes Rau brought to the country. Weizsacker was a Christian Democract and President 1984-1994 and West Berlin Mayor 1981-84. Rau was a Social Democrat; President 1999-2004 and Head of the huge RheinWestphalen Land (Region) from 1978-98.
I was spellbound listening to the speeches of the former as he made his famous gentle and highly civilised commentaries. A Foreign Affairs review expressed it well -

More than any of his predecessors in the presidential office, he has used that supraparty position to address fundamental issues, such as the ever-present unease about the German past, and he does so with clarity and admirable forthrightness. He has what few statesmen nowadays have: moral authority, and in his book-with its intelligent interlocutors-he turns from the past to the present and the future. His greatest worry concerns the vitality of liberal democracy in the enlarged Federal Republic, particularly in light of the power of German political parties in politics and public life generally-their power and the paucity of their imagination, the failure of their leadership. He is remarkably candid in his criticism of parties that only seek electoral gain and calls for a more active citizenry and regrets the immobility of Germany's political life, "the Utopia of the status quo." German commentators have seized on formulations that clearly hit the inadequacies of the present government, but these are incidental and inevitable. Weizsäcker's criticisms go far deeper. It took courage and, I suppose, the deepest concern to disturb the political complacency of his country and to do so with thoughts that in the German context and in some parts recall conservative criticisms of the Weimar period. But Weizsäcker's aim to strengthen, to vitalize liberal democracy is beyond question.

Johannes Rau was a son of a Lutheran priest and this showed in his approach. You can see a speech here which he delivered to the Israeli Knesset, the first German to address it.

I was lucky enough to meet both of these men informally and can therefore vouch personally for the humility they brought to their role. Weizsacker was holidying in Scotland and popped in quietly to pay his respects to the leader of the Regional Council. As the (elected) Secretary to the majority party, I had private access to the Leader’s office and stumbled in on their meeting. Rau I also stumbled across when in a Duisberg hotel on Council business. He was not then the President – but I recognised him when he came in with his wife and a couple of assistants, introduced myself ( as a fellow social democrat); gave him a gift book on my Region which I happened to be carrying and was rewarded with a chat.

I am glad to see that, with the nomination of Glauk, Germany seems now to be returning to its tradition of Presidents with moral authority. The German political system seems to me one of the best - with the leaders of strong Laender in the 2nd chamber acting as a responsible challenge to the Executive. Typical that, despite all the so-called discussion which has been going on for several decades about the reform of the British second chamber, this option has never been presented forcibly.....

Some readings on the crisis

2012-02-19T11:43:00.001+02:00

It may not have been evident from recent posts that one of my central concerns is the identification of an agenda for social change which is capable – by its appeal, relevance and clarity – of uniting a significant block of change agents in Europe at least. Two of my common moans are the insular nature of so much of the writing about this which one finds in the English language; and the failure of so many of the writers to build bridges to others writing on relevant subjects.
These faults were very evident in a Noreena Hertz pamphlet entitled Coop Capitalism just published by Cooperatives UK. Hertz is, apparently, one of these young celebrity Economists who have been taken up by the mass media and one of whose faults is to present ideas as if they were new. I’m not sure, for example, if her use of the term "gucci capialism” adds to our understanding of the crisis we face – and her references to examples of cooperatives are highly selective and superficial (Mondragon gets no mention). She allows this blurb about her to appear in the pamphlet -

many have described Professor Hertz as a visionary and she is one of the most influential economists on the international stage. Her work is considered to provide a much needed blueprint for rethinking economics and corporate strategy. For more than two decades Noreena Hertz’s economic predictions have been accurate and ahead of the curve. In her number one best-selling book “The Silent Takeover”, Hertz predicted that unregulated markets and massive financial institutions would have serious global consequences whilst her 2005 best-seller, “IOU: The Debt Threat”, predicted the 2008 financial crisis. Her books have been translated into 17 languages

Here is an example of how the media treat her – but here a more serious treatment of her ideas . I realise, of course, that such a comment could be taken as an example of how the left tear one another part – but change agents need to show more modesty and generosity in their referencing of relevant work.

Labour Left has published a 300 page Red Book which can be downloaded here. Labour Left’s ambition is

to generate ethically socialist policies for inclusion in the next Labour General Election manifesto. We aim to intellectually reclaim what it means to be left and we wish to help Ed Miliband steer a course away from Neo-Liberalism. It is clear from the surge in new members, especially younger ones since the General Election in 2010, that there is an appetite for socialist policies that tame the excesses of capitalism and re-balance the UK economy in a way that is fairer to the have-nots

Unfortunately, like all collections, the book’s contributions are ad-hoc (if worthy) presentations of various ideas relating to health, education and environmental issues – with no wider analysis of policy contexts nor argument as to whether the particular ideas would be supported let alone successful.

At the other end of the analytical and geographical spectrum is a major publication from the European Trade Unions Institute which, in 300 pages, looks at the changes in the infrastructure of each of the main European economies in the last 20 years. It takes as its starting point Colin Crouch’s insight about the strange non-death of neo-liberalism and is entitled A Triumph of Failed Ideas – european models of capitalism
It made me realise how seldom I have referenced the valiant efforts of various European Trade Unions and their research bodies in their tracking developments of the past decade eg the fantastic public services international research unit of the University of Greenwich which has been giving great briefings on the consequences of privatisation for more than a decade; NHS policy briefings ; European Services Strategy Unit.
But I have just come across what, for me, is the best source of radical thinking and activities in Europe – the Transform network which issues a biannual journal.

Geopolitics of Coffee and tea

2012-02-17T15:16:00.007+02:00

One of my favourite blogs is the It’s About time one – which sends me on a daily basis marvellous pictures of old paintings generally on a theme such as the ruffles which adorn the necks of aristocratic figures or the preparation of foods in medieval times – eg here and here
Some amazingly modern faces and styles are in evidence
I hadn’t realised that the famous Vienna coffee shops came from a some coffee beans being found in the fields outside Vienna in the aftermath of the Ottoman siege of Vienna in the 17th Century. Curious that the main thing which impacted me on my first visit to Istanbul some 25 years ago was their teas! In powder form and carried on trays around the bazzars and served as you looked at carpets.
My 3 years of ceremonially receiving and serving teas in small, beautiful bowls and teapots in Uzbekistan 1999-2002 almost killed the coffee habit in me. The coffees of Sofia dragged me back to the dangerous weed – but, at least, Sofia hedges its bets by having so many small shops which seel both coffee beans and Chinese teas!
I wanted to get an explanation for this apparent decline in Turkish tea-drinking but Google seemed strangely hooked on either the Tea Party or the Greg Mortensen saga (Three Cups of Tea). Wikipedia tells me that

tea became the widely consumed beverage of choice in Turkey only in the 20th century. It was initially encouraged as an alternative to coffee,which had become expensive and at times unavailable in the aftermath of the First World War. Upon the loss of southeastern territories after the fall of the Ottoman Empire, coffee became an expensive import. At the urging of the founder of the republic, Atatürk, Turks turned more to tea as it was easily sustainable by domestic sources

A Greek site tells me that tea there was expensive and, on independence from the Ottomans, was considered an upper-class habit. Another site told me of the Ottoman (red) tea spoken about by travellers and still apparently available in places such as Bursa - with 10 different natural ingredients - ginger, havlıcan (a plant in the ginger family), hibiscus, linden, cloves, lemon, orange, cinnamon, apple and thyme.

And I found this superb tea and carpets site which reminded me of the carpet-buying days in central asia and Turkey which preceded my current passion for painting.

Finally some lovely miniatures from the website with which I started

Technocrats, securitats ...and cronycrats

2012-02-16T11:33:00.009+02:00

An article in Scottish Review by someone apparently also living in Romania asks whether we now have 'Eurocracy' replacing democracy – pointing not only to the parachuting of bankers into the Greek and Italian Prime Minister jobs (in the greek case, the same guy who had overseen the falsification of accounts when the country entered the euro) but also to recent events in Romania. Romania has just completed a 2 year (apparently successful - at least in IMF terms!) spell of control by the IMF and, the article writes, –

two days after the IMF representative left Bucharest, the government of the deeply unpopular prime minister, Mr Emile Boc, resigned en masse and was swiftly replaced by a completely new government of what appear to be young technocrats. In Romania, the prime minister is appointed by the elected president. Finally, two days later, the governor of the Romanian Central Bank, the only man with any clue about fiscal and economic policy in the entire country, announced that responsibility for the nation's fiscal policy should no longer rest with the IMF but should be transferred to those nice German regulators at the EU, through the new fiscal treaty. Romania's president was one of the first non-Eurozone government heads to sign the treaty. Romania is confirmed as the next country, after Greece and Italy, to be governed by Merkozy's EU fiscal and political regime.

I have much sympathy with the author’s general point about the reduction of democracy but he is not quite right to argue that the new Romanian government is an example of the new "technocracy”. It is certainly true that the new Prime Minister Mihai Razvan Ungureanu, is not an elected politician. He was, previously, head of Romania's foreign intelligence – which makes him a "securitat" rather than "technocrat"! His full list of new ministers was approved yesterday in the Parliament. M.R. Ungureanu's government team is formed of all-new members from the Democratic Liberal Party (PDL), while coalition partners, the Hungarian Democrats (UDMR), and the UNPR retain their ministers who have served in Emil Boc's government. Two independents also keep their portfolios. Half, therefore, of the new government is unchanged – and only about 6 (on my count) are not politicians half of them incumbents. The full list of the new government is:

• Deputy PM - Marko Bela (UDMR, incumbent)
• Home Affairs and Administration Ministry - Gabriel Berca (PDL)
• Finance Ministry - Bogdan Dragoi (PDL)
• Economy Ministry - Lucian Bode (PDL)
• Foreign Affairs Ministry - Cristian Diaconescu (UNPR, incumbent)
• Transport Ministry -Alexandru Nazare (PDL)
• Environment Ministry - Laszlo Borbely (UDMR, incumbent)
• Tourism Ministry - Cristian Petrescu (PDL)
• Defense Ministry - Gabriel Oprea (UNPR, incumbent)
• Culture Ministry - Kelemen Hunor (UDMR, incumbent)
• Justice Ministry - Catalin Predoiu (independent, incumbent)
• Communications Ministry - Serban Mustea (PDL)
• Labor Ministry - Claudia Boghicevici (PDL)
• Education Ministry - Catalin Baba (PDL)
• Health Ministry - Ladislau Ritli (UDMR, incumbent)
• Agriculture Ministry - Stelian Fuia (PDL)
• European Affairs Ministry - Leonard Orban (independent, incumbent)

As many of the new members of the government are young - some of them in their early 30s - Mihai Razvan Ungureanu pointed out on Wednesday it was a young government formed of

new faces, exceptional professionals, people who I've worked with in various structures of the government. It is a government worthy of trust and ready to show not only a change in political generations but also a change of principle in activity

Frankly I don’t hold my breath. I have already commented that the younger generation of ambitious people here is no better than its elders. They owe their position to those elders (whether parents or protectors) and their education abroad has made them even more arrogant than their elders. It is, for me, significant, that the new Minister of Finance is the very young man I fingered in September 2010 for cronyism and disregard for such legalities as the need to make an open and honest declaration of financial interests. He was then State Secretary at the Ministry and is therefore apparently one of the non-elected technocrats – except that I doubt whether his route to that high-level civil service position permits that term to be used of him and his like. This is what my September 2010 blog said about him -

People like Dragoi enjoy such patronage (with no experience - he became a State Secretary at the age of 26 after an extended education!) and protection and seem so contemptuous of these forms that he doesn't even bother to update his form which understates his income by a factor of 40! 250 euros he says when it is actually 9,600!
His out-of-date form does, however, declare some of the additional revenues he earned as a committee member of various state funds.
I alighted on his declaration form by accident – just choosing his file at random from the list of officials’ forms. These assets, earnings and concealments reveal systemic immorality which, in Romania’s case, seems to be shaped and sustained by the role of its political parties which grabbed significant amounts of property in 1990 and which now determine the career path of young characters like Dragoi (nationally and internationally) and take in return a significant part of his earnings. For more on this issue see Tom Gallagher's 2010 article.

When people talk about pinning their hopes on the younger generation, I will always think of this face. It is when such behaviour is revealed that I feel some shame for having spent time working trying to reform such systems.

Perhaps, therefore, the term we should be using for Romania and similar countries with similar systems is not "technocracy" (which implies ability) but "cronycracy". By the way, an earlier article in Scottish Review by the same author was the best piece Ive read about the reasons for the protests here which led to the change in government.

The caricature is Daumier - one of history's best! This one is called Marionettes.

Some positive Greek responses

2012-02-16T08:45:00.004+02:00

For some time now, I’ve been wanting to visit Thessalonika which is just down the road. A week or so ago, I watched a documentary about the city’s new mayor – a 69 year-old vintner who got involved in citizen politics some 7 years back through disgust with the way the city was being run. It was clear he (Boutaris) was a popular figure as he walked through its streets with the journalist. Der Spiegel has a short article about how he is going about the reform of the city’s administration – eg hiring an auditor in his first week in office and reducing the number of Directorates from 31 to 20. Already the city's budget has decreased by 30%

Thessaloniki was always seen as a stronghold of the conservatives and nationalists. The conservative New Democracy party controlled city hall for 24 years, holding the city hostage with its cronies. During the election campaign, the local archbishop refused to allow Boutaris to kiss the cross during mass, even imposing an excommunication of sorts on the candidate: "As long as I am in office, you will not see the inside of city hall." A television crew recorded the incident, and when the footage was aired even conservative citizens were outraged over the archbishop's audacity. "People wanted change. They realized that things couldn't go on that way," says Pengas. Under Boutaris's predecessor, €51.4 million ($68.4 million) had suddenly and inexplicably disappeared from the city budget. No one knew what had happened to the money. A former prefect is now under investigation in the case.

One of the mayor’s young aides reckons that the city (with 7,000 officials) has double the number it needs – thanks to cronyism. So clearly some of the shine will come off the mayor’s image as he begins to tackle that problem. Already his attempts (with French help) to introduce performance evaluation of staff has hit resisitance.
All of this confirms the appalling picture which emerged in the recent OECD report on Greek administration - which, again, seems to have been covered only by Der Spiegel. But the Archbishop's behaviour reminds me of Michael Lewis' article on the Greek crisis which appeared in October 2010 (in the American Vanity Fair of all places) which fingered the Orthodox Church as the richest and most corrupt body in Greece!

Most of the articles which are appearing about the impact of government measures are focussing on the impoverisation of its people and settlements. But Le Monde of the 10th February ran an article called vivre la decroissance by two journalists Olivier Razemon and Alain Sailles to Athens telling the story of people who had set up a “bank of time” (trapeza chronou)..It works like this; people work as certain amount of hours and in exchange they get some services. Some people have set up a clothes exchange…Others are working solar systems in order to get free electricity…Some cultivate tomatoes, spinach, thyme, laurel, in a word all sorts of fruits and vegetables…which can be exchange for hours in the bank of time. The two journalists asked the question: “a big debate has ben launched; must we exchange products for services? If yes, how do you define the value of this product”. People in Britain have tried similar ‘alternative systems” like ‘letts’. It did not get very far…

An interesting Greek blog I've just come across gives a lot of detail going back some years about the situation there.
One of the journalists has recently published a book on a theme close to my heart – how concrete is destroying our countryside -

Année après année, la campagne française disparaît sous la ville. Malgré les proclamations indignées et les législations vertueuses, la terre fertile se raréfie, les espaces naturels se morcellent, la ville s’éparpille et se cloisonne, l’automobile s’impose comme unique lien social. Le phénomène, connu sous le nom d’étalement urbain, ne résulte pas seulement, comme on le croit souvent, de la crise du logement et du désir d’accession à la propriété individuelle. Centres commerciaux, entrepôts, parkings, la ville étalée se nourrit, en France comme ailleurs, d’une économie opulente et d’une société qui valorise le bonheur individuel, à court terme de préférence. Autrement dit, nous sommes tous responsables.
Les égoïsmes locaux, les tentations des élus et les tics des aménageurs se heurtent ça et là à des réflexes de survie. On pourrait densifier et vitaliser la ville existante. On pourrait prendre les décisions au bon niveau et en réfléchissant à l’avenir. On pourrait résister au tout-parking. On pourrait améliorer la qualité de vie sans gaspiller le territoire.
Les auteurs brossent un portrait vivant et sans concession de la bataille inégale qui se livre entre la soif de bitume et les rares garde-fous susceptibles de contrer le phénomène. Tout est perdu ? Voire. Et si les crises qui se profilent fournissaient un sursaut brutal mais inespéré ?

collapse of empires

2012-02-15T11:46:00.004+02:00

I am now literally marooned here in the Bucharest snow – such heavy snowfalls as have blocked the car exit although I have tried to clear the snow each day. As tends to happen in such situations, I have been losing myself in the past – first with Joseph Roth’s classic The Radeztky March written in 1930 and then with Robert Service’s Trotsky; a Life.

Roth’s book is the first of a trilogy and relates the stories of three generations of the Trotta family, professional Austro-Hungarian soldiers and career bureaucrats of Slovenian origin — from imperial zenith to First World War nadir. For saving him in battle, the Emperor awards Lt. Trotta the Order of Maria Theresa and ennobles him. Elevation to the nobility ultimately leads to the Trotta family’s ruination, paralleling the imperial collapse of Austria–Hungary (1867–1918).
Although he does not assume the airs of a social superior, everyone from the new baron’s old life perceives him as a changed person, as a nobleman. The perceptions and expectations of society eventually compel his reluctant integration in the aristocracy, a class with whom he is temperamentally uncomfortable. The disillusioned Baron Trotta opposes his son’s aspirations to a military career, insisting he prepare to become a government official, the second most respected career in the Austrian Empire; by custom, the German son was expected to obey. The son eventually becomes a district administrator in a Moravian town. As a father, the second Baron Trotta (still ignorant of why his war-hero father thwarted his military ambitions) sends his own son to become a cavalry officer; grandfather’s legend determines grandson’s life. The cavalry officer’s career of the third Baron Trotta comprises postings throughout the empire of Austria-Hungary and a dissipated life of wine, women, song, gambling, and dueling, off-duty pursuits characteristic of the military officer class in peace-time. In the progress of his career, Baron Trotta’s infantry unit suppresses a local uprising against the imperial government; awareness of the aftermath of his professional brutality begins his disillusionment with empire. I found this quotation from the last few pages of the book which covers the retreat from the borderland with Russia -

Most of these orders were to do with the evacuation of villages and town and the treatment of pro-Russian Ukrainians, clerics, and spies. Hasty court-martials in villages passed hasty sentences. Secret informers delivered unverifiable reports on peasants, Orthodox priests, teachers, photographers, officials. There was no time. The army had to retreat swiftly but also punish the traitors swiftly. And while ambulances, baggage columns, field artillery, dragoons, riflemen, and footsoldiers formed abrupt and helpless clusters on the sodden roads, while couriers galloped to and fro, while inhabitants of small towns fled westward in endless throngs, surrounded by white terror, laden with red-and-white featherbeds, grey sacks, brown furniture, and blue kerosene lamps, the shots of hasty executioners carrying out hasty sentences rang from the church squares of hamlets and villages, and the sombre rolls of drums accompanied the monotonous decisions of judges, and the wives of victims lay shrieking for mercy before the mud-caked boots of officers, and red and silver flames burst from huts and barns, stables and haystacks. The Austrian army’s war had begun with court-martials. For days on end genuine and supposed traitors hung from the trees on church squares to terrify the living.

Robert Service's Trotsky (2009) deals with the aftermath of the collapse of both the Austro Hungarian and Russian empires. It's a reasonable read - although the flurry of the revolutionary action did leave me a bit bewildered at time and I felt more space was needed (it's almost 600 pages). The picture painted of the man is not an attractive one - arrogance is the main feature stressed. The book has in fact attracted a fair amount of criticism - both for factual errors and those of bias - on a professional historian site which one might normally expect to be positive; and also by more political critics here and here.

Managing knowledge

2012-02-10T13:11:00.006+02:00

A colleague sent me recently some diagrams about knowledge management – which prompted some musings about a term which has never been an inviting one for me. When so much institutional knowledge has been lost by peremptory sackings and downsizings in the past decade and more, how can anyone take seriously an interest/discipline for the retention and management of knowledge? Or was KM indeed brought into being precisely because such losses of personnel were anticipated? And how does KM relate to the previously fashionable "organisational learning" – and the writers associated with that eg Peter Senge let alone the less celebrated Reg Revans and his "action learning"?
What precisely have we gained through use of the latest term? I could relate to the previous terms – but find "knowledge management” pretentious (in its reification of knowledge, implication that organisations can capture it) and offensive (in its apparent emphasis on systems rather than people). Perhaps it’s just me and my anarchistic leanings – I have never really properly belonged to an organisation although, when a senior politicians, I did organise a variety of forums which brought people together who did not normally rub shoulders with one another. And, as my website and blog demonstrate, I am very committed to sharing knowledge and experiences. I belong to that generation which does not see it as a private resource. But Knowledge Management, as I understand the subject, springs from the recognition that the skills and knowledge of an organisation’s staff are, potentially, the distinctive advantage it has these days which can pull in the profit. If only, that is, it can identify the winning formula and ensure it is applied appropriately elsewhere in the organisation. But all of this implies and requires trust – and this is the one thing which the management of modern organisations has succeeded in destroying.
Of course, many non-profit bodies, not least in the development field such as The World Bank, see themselves as knowledge hubs and have published useful stuff about how to collect, access and use appropriate lessons from practice. One recent (and rather simplistic example) example was from the World Bank Institute and, some years ago, the ODI did a very useful literature review.

But I still feel that the field itself deserves the sort of ridicule which , by serendipidity, another blogger heaped on management fads -

Until five years ago, I'd never heard of brand wheels. I'd chosen the relative penury of bookselling so that I would never have to sit in boardrooms, having serious conversations about things that didn't matter. It was an unspoken agreement. Then HMV bought the company I worked for and suddenly books were called 'product', knowledge became 'learnings' and the staff were called 'resource' (always singular, I noticed). The agreement had been broken. It was a horrible time.
One day I was invited to a regional meeting and an ambitious young manager revealed a diagram of a thing called a 'brand wheel'. It consisted of various segments that represented different aspects of running a bookshop. Things so painfully obvious that it seemed unnecessary to write them down.
There were lots of words like knowledge (not 'learnings', on this occasion), authority, communication, enthusiasm and development. There was a reductive quality about the brand wheel that smacked of totalitarianism (I'm sure that Stalin would have had one if he'd known about them): this is who we are, this is what we think and this is what we must do.

And my prejudices were reinforced when I glanced at the many volumes of text of the incredible project whciih has just tried to diagnose the state of the "knowledge sector" in Indonesia.

And, if you’re wondering why I’ve not said anything about the change of Romanian government which we have been experiencing this week, it’s simply because other people are saying it much better than me. See Sara’s blogposts since 6 February

The painting is a Josef Iser (1881-1958) - probably at the Hippidrome of his home town Ploiesti and one of whose paintings was available, at a private gallery I visited yesterday, for 15,000 euros. It's the Ana gallery which has a great collection of paintings -most however piled inaccessibly against the walls - and managed by a dour woman who follows you round and names the authors of each work you touch regardless of the interest you show. Very depressing.

Money silences

2012-02-08T07:39:00.001+02:00

A very important and revealing short piece on media freedom by Nick Cohen deserves a high profile -

The grand posture of writers in liberal democracies is that they are the moral equivalents of dissidents in repressive regimes. Loud-mouthed newspaper columnists claim to 'speak truth to power'. Novelists, artists, playwrights and comedians announce their willingness to transgress boundaries. Their publishers look for controversy like boozers look for brawls because they know that few marketing strategies beat the claim that a courageous iconoclast is challenging establishments and shattering taboos.
To maintain the illusion that they are part of some kind of radical underground, intellectuals must practise a deceit. They can never admit to their audience that fear of violent reprisals, ostracism or crippling financial penalties keeps them away from subjects that ought to concern them - and their fellow citizens.
Challenging writing about economic crises is rare. Diligent readers have every right to ask why so few financial writers warned them that the greatest crash since 1929 was on the way. As no less a personage than Her Majesty the Queen said to the academics at the London School of Economics, 'Did nobody notice?'
In Britain's case, any writer who had tried to research a book on the rapacious and authoritarian managers at the Royal Bank of Scotland or HBOS, for instance, or on the insanely reckless derivative swap and insurance markets in the London-based subsidiaries of Wall Street banks, would have run into the libel law. It is some barrier to overcome. The cost of a libel action in England and Wales is 140 times the European average. Contrary to common law and natural justice, the burden of proof is on the defendant. Even the few remaining wealthy newspapers, which have business models that have not yet been destroyed by the Internet, find it hard to afford a court case. For the publisher of a serious book, which would do well if it sold 50,000 copies, the idea of risking £1 million or more in a legal fight to defend it is close to unthinkable.

In 2006, the Danish tabloid Ekstra Bladet investigated the links between the Icelandic bank Kaupthing and tax havens. Kaupthing's managers did not like what they read, but failed to persuade the Danish press council that the paper had done anything wrong. The bank sued for libel in London instead. The newspaper pulled the articles and apologised because English lawyers ran up costs that were beyond its editor's worst nightmares - £1 million, and that was before a case had gone to court.
Kaupthing went for the paper in England not just because it wanted to kill the original story, but because it also wanted to deter others from spreading the idea that Iceland was not a safe place for investors. The English legal profession obliged. Newspapers' lawyers thought once, twice, one hundred times before authorising critical stories. A few months later Kaupthing collapsed - along with the other entrepreneurial, go-ahead Icelandic banks - and British depositors lost £3.5 billion. By allowing libel tourists to fly to London and use our repressive laws, the English legal profession had also stopped the British investors from learning of the danger in investing in the country's banks.

You no more hear writers and broadcasters admit that they are frightened of investigating investment banks than you hear them admit that they are frightened of challenging the founding myths of Islam. We cannot puncture our own myth that we are fearless seekers after truth, even though, if we honestly owned up to our limitations, we might force society to confront the fact that modern censorship does not conform to old models. It is a mistake to think of repression as repression by the state alone. In much of the world it still is, but in Britain, America and most of continental Europe the age of globalisation has done its work, and it is privatised rather than state forces that threaten freedom of speech.

Editors are no longer frightened of politicians but of Islamist violence, oligarchs and CEOs. They worry about libel and the ability of the wealthy to bend the ear of their proprietors or withdraw advertising. But they are not frightened about leaking the secrets or criticising the actions of elected governments. We need new ways of thinking about censorship. The first step is the most essential. Only when we have the courage to admit that we are afraid can we begin the task of extending our freedoms.

EC's Cohesion Funds (part V) A Tale of Sound and Fury?

2012-02-05T12:35:00.004+02:00

There’s something to be said for ignoring a policy field for several years and then trying to catch up with it in one go – it makes you focus on the essentials and certainly saves a lot of time! So it’s been in the last few days as I have downloaded and skimmed a lot of material on the (rather incestuous) debate which has been taking place over the past 2-3 years about the EC Structural (or Cohesion) Funds whose programme for 2014-2020 will have to be decided this year.

As the Commission’s views eventually surfaced at the end of 2011, it seems, frankly, to be have been a case of "sound and fury…signifying…nothing”! When I read the leaflet which set out the Commission’s proposals of 6 October, they don’t seem to contain anything significantly new – more ex-ante evaluation; better monitoring; and a new category of "transitional regions”. And the much-discussed idea of more local flexibility seems to have died without trace. So perhaps the journalists I accused of neglect in an earlier post have been correct to leave the subject well alone. As we say, it "doesn't appear to amount to a row of beans!"
In 2010, a slide presentation caught the terms of the then current debate rather well. For those masochists who want to follow the details of the debate, an archived site allows you to access both the key papers and also the various components of the 2009 Barca report including its ten 10 commissioned studies and a summary of some hearings.

Despite a caustic comment recently about language, the papers from Strathclyde University’s European Policies Centre are the only clear updates you get on Structural Funds. The latest is appropriately subtitled "let the negotiations begin".
In November 2011 one of the leading members of the Centre produced a paper EC Cohesion Policy and Europe 2020 – between place-based and people-based prosperity which subjected the debate on the EC’s Cohesion Policy to the dreadful Discourse Analysis -

Ideas are increasingly recognized as playing an important causal role in policy development. Instead of seeing change as the product of strategic contestation among actors with clear and fixed interests, an ideational perspective emphasises the struggle for power among actors motivated by different ideas.

The last half of the paper, however is actually interesting - it traces the history of cohesion policy and then explores the various policy positions about the nature and shape of the future programme (which now accounts for 40% of the EU budget). The paper suggests 2 central dimensions – focus and management – to construct a matrix. The focus can be geographical place or sector (eg transport, energy, IT, environment); the management central (EC led) or local (national) – which gives four options -
• Territorial contractualism (top-down); supported by two key players – the European Parliament and the European Commission’s Regional Policy Department (DG Regio)
• Territorial experimentalism (with more local flexibility); supported by the Committee of Regions
• Sectoral functionalism (top-down); supported by the other relevant Commission Directorates
• Sectoral coordination

Ideas in these arguments become tools which rationalise the interests of the various actors. As I thought about the process, I was suddenly reminded of one of the seminal texts in the literature of political science – Graham Allison’s The Essence of Decision (1971) - which applied three different explanatory models to the Cuban Crisis – the rational (what is in the interests of the government); the organisational process (organisations do what they are used to doing); and bureaucratic (court) politics ("various overlapping bargaining games among players arranged hierarchically in the national government”). This is a paper of his from 1968 which presents the basic proposition; and this a critique from 1992.

we don't live in a post industrial age

2012-02-03T13:50:00.004+02:00

I’m reading Ha-Joon Chang’s 23 Things they don’t tell you about Capitalism at the moment – and am very impressed. An economist who writes simply and elegantly (shades of JK Galbraith) and makes you think (as distinct from fall asleep). Section nine – entitled We do not live in a post-industrial age - took me back to arguments with my father in the 1970s about the role of industry. The indifference (at least) of British social scientists – and the policy elites who took their arguments – to the decline of manfacturing industry is a phenomenon to which we have not yet done historical justice! Here’s some of what Chang has to say -

Part of the de-industrialisation myth is due to optical illusions – reflecting, for example, changes in statistical classification rather than changes in real activities. One such illusion is due to the outsourcing of some activities that used to be provided inhouse by manufacturing firms and thus captured as manufacturing output (e.g., catering, cleaning, technical supports). When they are outsourced, recorded service outputs increase without a real increase in service activities. Even though there is no reliable estimate of its magnitude, experts agree that outsourcing has been a significant source of de-industrialisation in the US and Britain, especially during the 1980s.
In addition to the outsourcing effect, the extent of manufacturing contraction is exaggerated by what is called the reclassification effect. A UK government report estimates that up to 10% of the fall in manufacturing employment between 1998 and 2006 in the UK may be accounted for by some manufacturing firms, seeing their service activities becoming predominant, applying to the government statistical agency to be re-classified as service firms, even when they are still engaged in some manufacturing activities.
A third factor in the myth is the relative price-effect. With the (inflation-adjusted) amount of money you paid to get a PC ten years ago, today you can probably buy three, if not four, computers of equal or even greater computing power (and certainly smaller sizes). As a result, you probably have two, rather than just one, computers. But, even with two computers, the portion of your income that you spend on computers has gone down quite a lot (for the sake of argument, I am assuming that your income, after adjusting for inflation, is the same). In contrast, you are probably getting the same number of haircuts as you did ten years ago (if you haven’t gone thin on the top, that is). The price of haircuts has probably gone up somewhat, so the proportion of your income that goes to your haircut is greater than it was 10 years ago.
The result is that it looks as if you are spending a greater (smaller) portion of your income on haircuts (computers) than before, but the reality is that you are actually consuming more computers than before, while your consumption of haircuts is the same.

A very thorough review in Dissident Voice starts with an excellent summary of some of the main points Chang makes - all starting with a statement of "what they tell us", followed by a demolition of the conventional wisdom -

* Government must never interfere with “the free market.” (Chang says WRONG: modern economies would collapse without numerous forms of government intervention. Smart capitalists know very well that “there is no such thing as a free market.”)
* Companies should always be run in the interests of their owners/shareholders (WRONG: shareholders often damage the long-term prospects of companies by over-emphasizing short-term profit.)
* Economic health requires the assumption that people think only about themselves (WRONG: the most successful firms and national economies understand how to harness peoples’ cooperative and altruistic sentiments and instincts.)
* Poor counties need to adopt “free market” (neoliberal) policies (especially “free trade”) to achieve sustained growth. (WRONG: developing countries experienced superior growth in the period of state-led Third World development [1945-1970] than in the period of neoliberal, market-oriented “reform.” This is richly consistent with how the world’s richest nations – the ones who preach neoliberalism to the rest of the world – rose to ascendancy in the past: “through a combination of protectionism, subsidies, and other [state- and not market-led) policies that today they advise developing countries not to adopt” [63].)
* The relatively free market, capitalist-friendly neoliberal United States enjoys the highest standard of living in the world. (WRONG: thanks to the nation’s remarkably high levels of inequality [itself a symptom of its extreme neoliberalism], millions of Americans do not enjoy the United States’ remarkable average living standard. That extreme inequality and the poverty it generates are the main factors behind comparatively poor health indicators and crime levels in the U.S. Higher immigration and poor working conditions explain are the main reasons that many services are purchased more cheaply in the U.S. At the same time, Americans work considerably longer hours than Europeans so that “per hours worked, their command over goods and service is smaller than that of several European countries [103].”)
* Making rich people richer makes the rest richer too since it is rich people who seek out marketing opportunities and then invest to create jobs (WRONG: pro-rich policies have failed to produce economic expansion in the last three decades. “Trickle down economics” doesn’t work. It can have no positive outcomes in the absence of polices that (contrary to neoliberal doctrine) that make the rich deliver higher investment and share the benefits with – and put spending power in the hands of – non-affluent people, who spend a higher portion of their income than do the rich).
* Government must give maximum freedom to big corporations for the good of the countries in which those companies reside (WRONG: it is often better for the national economy and even the individual company for government to impose reasonable restraints and obligations on those companies).
* Capital has no nationality in the age of multinational corporations and globalization and therefore it nationalistic government policies towards transnational capital is “at best ineffective and at worst counterproductive” (WRONG: “most transnational companies in fact remain national companies with international operations, rather than genuinely nation-less companies” and it is “very naïve to base economic policies on the myth that capital does not have any national roots anymore”)
* Governments lack the ability (including the required expertise and information) to make intelligent business choices and thereby “pick winners” through state-led industrial policy. (WRONG: governments can and do regularly choose winning firms and industries over and against “market signals” and in ways that can and do “improve national economic performance”).
* The only equality that is economically functional or advisable is equality of opportunity. Policies that seek to generate more equality of outcome are inherently inefficient and unjust (WRONG: the equality of opportunity that is required to broaden the spread of economic benefits does not really exist without at least some measures to enhance equality of outcome. Free public education is woefully insufficient to broaden opportunity when it is not accompanied by policies that put a basic decent minimum standard of material living for households on the bottom end of the scale).
* The big government welfare state damages economies by depriving the rich of the incentive to create wealth and making the poor lazy. It creates resistance to the change that modern economies require. (WRONG: by providing second and third chances and a safety net to the non-affluent, the welfare state encourages workers to be more open to change when comes to choosing their first jobs and letting go of their existing jobs).
* Efficient financial markets – capable of the rapid allocation and re-allocation of capital across time and place – are the source of economic health and expansion Recent financial disturbances aside, smart policy makers should do nothing to slow down and complicate the operation of the world’s high speed financial markets (WRONG: U.S. and western financial markets are actually too efficient. The currently over-developed financial sector is now so proficient and organized in the pursuit of short-term profits that it is a leading source of economic instability and is incapable of giving emergent enterprises and industries and complex national economies the patient nurturance they require to develop over time.)

The painting is the only abstract which graces my collection - by Stefan Pelmus, more of whose paintings can be seen here.

Classic Romanian painters

2012-02-02T14:19:00.003+02:00

Still blocked in Bucharest with the snow and biting temperatures (minus 27 in Brasov last night) and, being the first Wednesday of the month, what better to do than take advantage of the free entry to galleries which this date always offers. So off to the great National Museum of Romanian Art – and straight up to the third floor (so as not to be tired out by the time the modern section is reached!) The large collection there starts with a generous number of the bright Theodor Aman (1831-1891) society paintings – ditto Nicolae Grigorescu (1838-1907) and Ion Andreescu (1850-1882) - and gives a new perspective on every visit.

I had previously praised a website which purports to show the Romanian cultural patrimony but now notice that none of the great paintings on display seem to be in the virtual collection.

Stefan Popescu (1872-1948), for example, is a great favourite of mine – particularly those which reflect his time in northern Africa. Sadly, however, I can find none of these on the site (which is, in any event organised in a very administrative, non-user friendly way) - or online generally. If you scroll down on this blogpost (on my links) about the Brasov Gallery you will get a certain sense of some of the classic Romanian painters.

The National Gallery always has interesting publications and, this time, I bought (for 7 euros) a very well-produced 122 page book on their modern school. At the Humanitas bookshop nearby, I bought, for 9 euros, the 150 page book on Theodor Aman – and also a great-looking source book on Balkan Cinema.

Romania's Al Capone moment

2012-02-01T08:52:00.008+02:00

One of Romania’s ex-Prime Ministers was sentenced yesterday to 2 years in jail – although, compared with the wider suspicions against him and all those who occupy such positions here, the issue on which he was sentenced smacks a bit of the Al Capone syndrome (done for taxation issues; this is Capone's mugshot) -

Romanian High Court of Justice magistrates gave former prime minister Adrian Nastase on Monday a 2-year sentence and stripped him of certain rights in a corruption case known locally as the "Quality Trophy" file. In this case, Nastase, who served as head of the Romanian government between 2000 and 2004 (see pic below), was charged of supporting his electoral campaign through funds collected in a "Quality Trophy" event organized by the a public institution. The sentence can be appealed. UPDATE Adrian Nastase said on Monday he would appeal the verdict and that he was sure "things will be corrected on appeal". He called the verdict a "political decision, a dirty decision" and referred to "rumors" that head judge Ionut Matei "had meetings with representatives of the National Anti-corruption Department", the body which launched the corruption investigation against him.

In fact, Nastase cut a fairly impressive figure when he was PM - open and intelligent - probably the least corrupt of the lot (apart from Trade Unionist lawyer and National Peasant Party Ciorba). He did attract some ridicule for his attribution some years back of his unexplained wealth to the inheritance from an old aunt. He is in fact the first high-level politician to go to jail - Severin, the MEP, still shamelessly draws his salary and expenses - despite his exposure a year ago for corrput practices and banishment from the socialist bloc.
Those who wish to know about current events in Romania are best to follow the Sarah in Romania blog which is on my links. And she had a good post recently on the protests here which continue even in the biting cold here (minus 22 last night) -

Romania's president incumbent, Traian Basescu, spoke on national television last week for the first time since protests began almost three weeks ago, in defense of his government's tough austerity measures. The measures suffered in Romania have been immensely strict. "Brutal and unthinkable in a West European country" was the verdict on the two years of austerity from Andreas Treichl, the president of Austria's Erste Group, the largest foreign investor in the Romanian banking sector.
• 2011 budget deficit 4.35% of GDP
• public sector pay cut by 25%
• VAT raised from 19% to 24% (only surpassed by Iceland, Hungary and Norway)

We have been very much aware of the harsh conditions inflicted on the Greeks due to their own government's wheelings and dealings for decades, but very little, if anything, was reported by the international press up until the protests on those suffered by the Romanian people. In his 35-minute address to the nation, Mr Basescu acknowledged "some citizens have lost faith" but said the measures had pulled the country out of a recession, the Associated Press reported. "I know what needs to be done. We are where we should be. Romania has come out of a recession," he said.
To say that 'some citizens have lost faith' is something of an understatement. If the press and the social networks are to be believed, a very large majority of the country has lost faith - and that can be seen in the thousands who have taken to the streets across the entire country over the last 13 days. Teodor Baconschi, the Foreign Minister, was fired after he called protesters "inept and violent slum dwellers," and compared them to the miners who took to the streets of Bucharest in the 1990s. Clearly, the government believed this would mollify the protesters, but they remain wholely unconvinced.
In the nationally televised speech delivered live from the presidential palace on the occasion of Cristian Diaconescu's swearing-in as the new Foreign Minister, Basescu said his government would continue to create more jobs and fight against corruption and tax evasion. If Romania is really going to fight corruption, surely those in power now will have to step down and certain members of the opposition (the majority, in fact) would be unable to take power. You know the saying - 'the fish rots from the head...' Of course, corruption is so deep-seated one is helpless in knowing where to begin, but those in power today are as guilty of it as anyone. As are some in the opposition. There is the quandry. They are both as bad as each other. Today, the US Ambassador to Romania, Mark H. Gitenstein, criticised the country's high-level corruption - not particularly helpful, since it's nothing particularly new...
Those calling for Traian Basescu's resignation continue to state that ANYONE would be better than him. Those hoping he stays say that this is truly not the case. And so far, there is nobody else.
On 24 january, about 2,000 teachers, nurses, retired army officers and trade unionist rallied outside the government's headquarters: "I want to regain my dignity, I want this dictatorship formed by president and prime minister to fall," said Otilia Dobrica, a kindergarten teacher and part-time secretary who earns around $420 a month.
"We can't take any more," nurse Adriana Vintila explained. "Four million Romanians have left to work abroad because they can no longer survive in their home country. I don't want to leave; it's the government that should go."
About 5,000 people rallied in Iasi, calling for early elections, whilst in Bucharest's Piata Victoriei, protesters shouted "Freedom, Early Elections!" during yesterday's anti-government rally. “When I was the captain of a ship I never failed to bring my ship to port and I won’t fail to bring Romania to safe harbour,” Traian Basescu said during his address. “The belief that the president no longer represents the people is false. The president’s obligation is to represent them continuously, as the president has been elected through direct vote.”
Romania has been transformed since the overthrow of the Communist dictatorship in 1989 and the sometimes violent instability that followed. The nouveau-riche jet-set of young Romanians fill trendy nightclubs and plush restaurants that have sprouted up in Bucharest, and shiny new SUVs cruise the capital’s boulevards. There are many who do not wish to lose what Romania has today - better, richer in comparison to the way things were. They say that Traian Basescu is not a dictator and that Romania is no longer a dictatorship - they lived in and survived one. They know. Today, they have an opposition in parliament and they can protest in the streets. That is proof that no dictatorship exists today.
And yet, those in favour of the opposition, or at least, those calling for the resignation of Traian Basescu, Emil Boc and the fall of the present government say the benefits of progress have been uneven: life is harsh in rural areas and in the capital. Seventy hospitals nationwide have been closed; education has taken a nose-dive; if one wants a decently-paid job then one must go abroad; pensions are insultingly low; salaries have been cut. Among the EU nations, only neighbouring Bulgaria is poorer. Laws are passed without going through parliament to suit those in power, eg. Rosia Montana. That is NOT democracy.
Traian Basescu's speech, said Crin Antonescu, leader of PNL, was a sign that he was out of touch with reality and that he should resign, whilst Victor Ponta, the leader of PSD, told Agerpres that the speech said nothing at all and had no link whatsoever to do with what was happening in Romania.
Indeed, Romania finds itself today at a deeply messy and complex impasse. To choose between rotten apples and rotten pears is impossible and, until someone better comes along, until a new party surfaces that is not filled with officers and informants of the securitate and yesterday's nomenclatura, I remain fearful for the future of the country of my heart.

And Sarah also has a very readable piece today about Romania’s great dramatist – Caragiale – who was, as I mentioned on the 30 January posting, born 160 years ago -

By the late 1870s, Caragiale began writing the plays which cemented his reputation as an important playwright in Romania. In both plays and prose, he showed an incredible sense of the Romanian language, customs, and mannerisms, especially in the common person, and successfully used them for comedy and satire. Caragiale was highly observant of the human condition, particularly our tendency towards mistakes. He used what he saw and heard in his stories which generally focused on social conflicts and political corruption. The plays, especially, were full of fast-moving action and farce, employing solid characters with witty dialogue who usually failed in their goals. In the 1980s, Caragiale's plays were banned until the dictator Nicolae Ceausescu was executed in 1989

Thank you, Sarah, for these excellent posts!

World Social Forum

2012-01-31T11:11:00.004+02:00

Every now and then I bemoan the lack of journals giving an adequate coverage of European life and policies. Any amount of stuff on Europe as a concept or European Union policies – but virtually nothing which gives us a comparative sense of national policies (in those fields still within the control of member states). Today I came across a French website - Books and Ideas - which does at least seem to offer, in the English language, some non-Anglo-Saxon perspectives.
And one of its contributions offered an answer to something which had been puzzling me since last summer when I wrote an article for a special issue of a Romanian journal which was devoted to the world a decade after 09/11. My piece was entitled "The Dog that didn’t Bark” and focussed on the general failure of radicals to capitalise on the global crisis – and, more specifically, the apparent failure of the World Social Forum which had been so active until 2005. The Forum is apparently right now holding another of its huge meetings - in Brazil (significant that I get the detail only from a German media source) - and Geoffrey Pleyers suggests two things in his article in BooksandIdeas - first that the Forum has been a victim of its own success (with many politicians now using their rhetoric); and, second, that the movement has now fragmented around three distinct trends -

1. A Focus on the Local Level
Rather then getting involved in a global movement and international forums, a wide “cultural trend” of the alter-globalization movement considers that social change may only occur by implementing participatory, convivial and sustainable values in daily practices, personal life and local spaces. In many Italian social centres, critical consumption and local movements have often taken the space previously occupied by the alter-globalization movement. Local “collective purchase groups” have grown and multiplied in Western Europe and North America. Most of them gather a dozen activists who organize collective purchases from local and often organic food producers. Their goal is to make quality food affordable, to bring an alternative to the “anonymous supermarket” and to promote local social relations. The movement for a “convivial degrowth” belongs to a similar tendency and aims to implement a lifestyle that is less of a strain on natural resources and reduces waste.

2. Citizens’ and Experts’ Advocacy Networks
Rather than massive assemblies and demonstrations, another component of the movement believes that concrete outcomes may be achieve through efficient single-issue networks able to develop coherent arguments and efficient advocacy. Issues like food sovereignty, Third World debt and financial transactions are considered both as specific targets and as an introduction to broader questions. Through the protection of water, activists raise for instance the issue of global public goods, oppose global corporations and promote the idea of “the long-term efficiency of the public sector” (“Water network assembly”, European Social Forum 2008). After several years of intense exchanges among citizens and experts focusing on the same issue, the quality of the arguments has considerably increased. In recent years, they have become the core of social forums’ dynamic. Although they get little media attention, these networks have proved efficient in many cases. During the fall of 2008, the European Water Network contributed to the decision by the City of Paris to re-municipalize its water distribution, which had been managed previously by private corporations. Debt cancellation arguments have been adopted by Ecuadorian political commissions, and some alter-globalization experts have joined national delegations in major international meetings, including the 2008 WTO negotiations in Geneva.

3. Supporting Progressive Regimes
A third component of the movement believes that a broad social change will occur through progressive public policies implemented by state leaders and institutions. Alter-globalization activists have struggled to strengthen state agency in social, environmental and economic matters. Now that state intervention has regained legitimacy, this more “political” component of the movement believes that time has come to join progressive political leaders’ efforts. It has notably been the case around President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela as well as President Evo Morales in Bolivia. New regional projects and institutions have been launched on this basis, like the “Bank of the South” that has adopted the main tasks of the IMF in the region. For historical reasons and their political cultures, Latin American and Indian activists are used to proximity with political parties and leaders.

And a German journal gives a frightening insight into the Greek situation -

The Greek economy is not productive enough to generate growth. Aside from olive oil, textiles and a few chemicals, there are hardly any Greek products suitable for export. On the contrary, Greece is dependent on food imports to feed its population.
"Greece has been living beyond its means for years," an unpublished study by the German Institute for Economic Research (DIW) concludes. "The consumption of goods has exceeded economic output by far."
Especially devastating is the assessment that the DIW experts make about the condition of an industry that is generally seen as a potential engine for growth: tourism. According to the DIW study, the Greek tourism industry concentrates on the summer months, with almost nothing happening throughout the rest of the year. There is almost no tourism in the cities, which translates into low overall capacity utilization and high costs for hotel operators. By contrast, capacity utilization in the hotel sector is much more uniform in other Mediterranean countries.
According to the study, a key cause of the problem is the relatively poor price/performance ratio. In Mediterranean tourism, Greece has to compete with non-euro countries like Croatia, Tunisia, Morocco, Bulgaria and Turkey, which can offer their services at significantly lower prices. The per-hour wage in the hospitality industry was recently measured at €11.39 in Greece, as compared with only €8.49 in Portugal, €4 in Turkey and as little as €1.55 in Bulgaria. The study arrives at grim conclusions, noting that the drastic austerity programs will not only remain ineffective, but will also stigmatize the country as "Europe's problem child" for a long time to come.

The painting is a....Turner, of course!

Cohesion Policy - part IV

2012-01-30T15:38:00.005+02:00

The last few posts have been about the apparent lack of public knowledge (including mine - let alone discussion) about an issue which has been absorbing the energies of thousands of specialists throughout Europe in the last 2-3 years – namely the future shape and management of the huge amounts of money which Europe disburses to Regions and which take up the energies and time of so many officials in countries such as Bulgaria and Romania – with so much acrimony (confusion, corruption and penalties) and so few apparent results.

My concerns are not populist – since I have always accepted the existence of „market failure” and the case for government intervention and spending programmes.
My recent experience in the field in Bulgaria raises the following sorts of questions -
• What was actually achieved in the period since 2007 by the 50 billion a year spent on what most of us know as EC Structural Funds (although technically it comes from 6-7 differently-named programmes)?
• Where is the country by country analysis?
• Can one programme do justice to the needs of 27 countries – even granted its management is in the hands of each country?
• Particularly a programme of which amost half is in new member states (still in transit from centralised political cultures) and which yet makes no mention of the specifics of these countries?
• Has it not been a mistake to run the programme as a regional development one when the needs are more institutional and developmental?
• In what precise ways is the new proposed policy from 2014 different from that which has ruled for the 2007-2013 period?
• And what weaknesses of the previous policy explains the changes?
• What exactly is the "place-based approach” which is trumpeted in the new policy ??
• Where are debates which deal clearly and honestly with these questions?

I am encouraged by one semi-official report (of 250 pages) which appeared in 2009 – the Barca Report - which seems very well written, draws on a wide range of discussions and openly admits (a) the conceptual and political confusion; (b) the difficulties in measuring impact; and (c), in the very first page, the lack of public debate -

What is lacking is a political debate about whether that particular way of spending public funds adds value compared to sectoral or national approaches. And when and where it is effective. The same failure is visible in the academic debate, where very often a line separates the “cohesion policy experts” and the rest of academia.

I've a long way to go in reading this report - so please be patient. And, in the meantime, I stick with my main accusation - that there don't seem to be any journalists writing about this issue!

Today Romanian media have been celebrating the birthday of their most famous dramatist - Caragiale - who was born 160 years ago. The Romanians are very fond of him and his mocking of the political process.Mitica was a character who cropped up in his plays and whom the Transylvanians particularly associated with the slippery southerners. Wikipedia have a very detailed entry on his life and works.

The painting is a Levitan

Briefings on the new Cohesion Policy

2012-01-29T18:04:00.003+02:00

A summary of the new Cohesion Fund which the EC is proposing to replace the present Structural Funds is available here.
The University of Strathclyde’s European Policies Research Centre can generally be counted on for clear summaries of the issues involved in EC regional policies and duly produced two years ago a paper “Challenges, Consultations and Concepts – preparing for the Cohesion Policy Debate”

Last August the Centre presented an updated 150 pages briefing on the issues to the European Parliament - Comparative study on the vision and options for Coherence Policy after 2013 – although its Executive Summary does not seem quite up to its normal standards of clarity. Judge for yourself -

The Commission proposes to reinforce the urban agenda, encourage functional geographies, support areas facing specific geographical or demographic problems and enhance the strategic alignment between transnational cooperation and macro-regional strategies.
Unsurprisingly, there is resistance to some of the more prescriptive elements. Yet, the territorial dimension could benefit from a greater strategic steer at EU level, potentially drawing on the recently agreed Territorial Agenda for 2020 to clarify and reinforce future territorial priorities for Cohesion Policy. A more strategically focused approach to the territorial dimension of cooperation must also be a priority, including a greater focus on priorities and projects of real transnational and cross border relevance, seeking greater coherence with mainstream, external cross-border cooperation and macro-regional strategies and the simplification of administrative requirements.

And what, exactly, does this mean???

The 2009 Barca Report was a bit long (250 pages plus 10 annexes) but did at least give a good summary of what we know about the impact of Structural Funds -

20. The state of the empirical evidence on the performance of cohesion policy is very unsatisfactory. The review of existing research, studies, and policy documents undertaken in the process of preparing the Report suggests, first, that econometric studies based on macro-data on growth and transfers, while providing specific suggestions, do not offer any conclusive general answer on the effectiveness of policy. This is due partly to the serious problems faced by any attempt to isolate at macro-level the effects of cohesion policy from those of several confounding factors, and partly to the fact that existing studies have largely analysed the effect on convergence, which is not a good proxy of the policy objectives. The review also shows both the
lack of any systematic attempt at EU and national/regional levels to assess whether specific interventions “work” through the use of advanced methods of impact evaluation, and a very poor use of the system of outcome indictors and targets formally built by the policy.

21. Despite these severe limitations, the available quantitative evidence and a large body of qualitative evidence lead to two conclusions on the current architecture of cohesion policy. First, cohesion policy represents the appropriate basis for implementing the place-based development approach needed by the Union. Second, cohesion policy must undergo a comprehensive reform for it to meet the challenges facing the Union.

22. The strengths of cohesion policy, which indicate that it represents the appropriate basis,
include, in particular:
• the development of several features of what has come to be called the “new paradigm of regional policy”, namely the establishment of a system of multi-level governance and contractual commitments that represents a valuable asset for Europe in any policy effort requiring a distribution of responsibilities.
• A good track record of achieving targets, both when cohesion policy has been implemented as a coherent part of a national development strategy and when local-scale projects have been designed with an active role of the Commission and the input of its expertise.
• A contribution to institution-building, social capital formation and a partnership approach in many, though not all, regions, producing a lasting effect.
• The creation of an EU-wide network for disseminating experience, for cooperation and, for sharing methodological tools in respect of evaluation and capacity building.

23. The most evident weaknesses which indicate the need for reform of cohesion policy are:
• A deficit in strategic planning and in developing the policy concept through the coherent adoption of a place-based, territorial perspective.
• A lack of focus on priorities and a failure to distinguish between the pursuit of efficiency and social inclusion objectives.
• A failure of the contractual arrangements to focus on results and to provide enough leverage for the Commission and Member States to design and promote institutional changes tailored to the features and needs of places.
• Methodological and operational problems that have prevented both the appropriate use of indicators and targets – for which no comparable information is available - and a satisfactory analysis of “what works” in terms of policy impact.
• A remarkable lack of political and policy debate on results in terms of the well-being of people, at both local and EU level, most of the attention being focused on financial absorption and irregularities.

The new Cohesion Policy as a case-study in Orwellian language?

2012-01-29T14:56:00.006+02:00

Having made a casual reference a few days ago to a rather superficial paper on EC Structural Funds (with which I have a tangential link in my current Bulgarian project), I was understandably attracted by the title of one of the LSE lecture series - Redesigning the World's Largest Development Programme: EU cohesion policy - by the Special Adviser to the current EC Regional Commissioner (Austrian Johannes Hahn) – one Phil McCann, a Professor of Economic Geography. Particularly because it also offered a 91 slide presentation.
Before I started to listen to it, I checked on Googlescholar to see whether McCann had perhaps not written an article on the subject - which I could read in a fifth of the time necessary to stick with the lecture. Unfortunately McCann’s papers are highly academic and almost impossible to read – eg here.
The guy seems very chatty in person but the more he gets into his subject, the more naïve he (and his type) seems. The academic discipline of geography has always seemed, for me, one of the best of the social sciences with its strong multidisciplinary bias. So (and from the title) I had hoped to get an insight into the intellectual and political aspects of the european-wide discussions of the past 2 years about the future shape of this central piece of the “European venture” (now almost level pegging spending with the wasteful CAP).
What I got was a frightening Orwellian presentation of the latest fashionable EC phrases. I have still to read all the relevant documentation which has poured from the EC presses in the past 2 years (and to which I do brief justice in the sections below). All I know is that the key adviser to the Regional Commissioner seems to know nothing about policy analysis; seems completely taken in by words and phrases; and seems blissfully ignorant about the various reasons for implementation failure. I do concede that he was speaking to a student and graduate academic audience - and that this may be one reason why he focussed on words rather than realities.

Discussions on the future of EU Cohesion Policy - €347 billion between 2007 and 2013 – were launched amost 3 years ago.
Two key documents which appeared almost simultaneously in April 2009 have served as a basis for discussions on regional policy reform: first a reflection paper by Danuta Hübner, who had just demitted office as commissioner in charge of regional policy (from Nov 2004) and amost immediately became chair of the European Parliament’s Committee on Regional Development (!!)
The other document was a report she had commissed - and which was drafted by Fabrizio Barca, director-general at the Italian Ministry of Economy and Finance.
Both papers categorically rejected any attempt to renationalise Cohesion Policy - which was the thrust of the Open Europe Report I had mentioned earlier in the week.

Barca’s report, in particular, pays homage to the legitimacy of a policy, which he considers essential to pursuing European goals. The policy, says the report, must serve two objectives: development of territories based on local/regional possibilities; and improvements in social welfare (combating social exclusion). Like Hübner, Barca suggests placing territories at the centre of EU strategy. Both papers considered that EU intervention must be refocused on a few key objectives.
The report's recommendations for reform seem typical in their language of such documents. They are based on ten “pillars” and I would ask the reader – as a mind-game – to try reversing the phrases to check for how much meaning they contain -

1: Concentration on core priorities (how many of us would suggest focussing on inessentials??)
Dr Barca says the EU should concentrate around 65% of its funding on three or four core priorities, with the share varying between Member States and regions according to needs and strategies. Criteria for the allocation of funding would remain much as now (i.e. based on GDP per capita). One or two core priorities should address social inclusion to allow for the development of a "territorialised social agenda".
2: A new strategic framework
The strategic dialogue between the Commission and Member States (or Regions in some cases) should be enhanced and based on a European Strategic Development Framework, setting out clear-cut principles, indicators and targets for assessing performance.
3: A new contractual relationship, implementation and reporting
The Commission and Member States should develop a new type of contractual agreement (a National Strategic Development Contract), focused on performance and verifiable commitments.
4: Strengthened governance for core priorities
The Commission should establish a set of “conditionalities” for national institutions as a requirement for allocating funding to specific priorities and should assess progress in meeting targets.
5: Promoting additional, innovative and flexible spending (how many of us would suggest inflexible spending????)
The Commission should strengthen the principle of "additionality", which ensures that Member States do not substitute national with EU expenditure, by establishing a direct link with the Stability and Growth Pact. A contractual commitment is needed to ensure that measures are innovative and add value.
6: Promoting experimentation and mobilising local actors (ditto)
The Commission and Member States should encourage experimentation, and a better balance between creating an incentive for local involvement in policies and preventing the policy from being “hijacked” by interest groups.
7: Promoting the learning process: a move towards prospective impact evaluation
Better design and implementation of methods for estimating what outcomes would have been had intervention not taken place would improve understanding of what works where, and exert a disciplinary effect when actions are designed.
8: Strengthening the role of the Commission as a centre of competence (as distinct from a centre of incompetence?)
Develop more specialised expertise in the Commission with greater coordination between Directorate-Generals to match the enhanced role and discretion of the Commission in the policy. This would imply significant investment in human resources and organisational changes.
9: Addressing financial management and control (as distinct from ignoring them???)
Achieve greater efficiency in administering the Structural Funds by pursuing the ongoing simplification agenda and considering other means of reducing costs and the burden imposed on the Commission, the Member States and beneficiaries.
10: Reinforcing the high-level political system of checks and balances
A stronger system of checks and balances between the Commission, the European Parliament and the Council, through the creation of a formal Council for Cohesion Policy. Encourage an ongoing debate on the content, results and impact of the Cohesion Policy.

Such an approach argues for a Cohesion Policy which continues to address all EU regions, both Barca and Hübner say. Pawel Samecki, who succeeded Hübner as commissioner (but for one year only until replaced by an Austrian who is contesting accusations of plagiarism in his doctorate)), follows the same logic. Since both (or all three) defend the need to concentrate the greatest share of funds on less developed regions, where GDP per inhabitant would remain the reference indicator for prioritising funding, we are no longer talking about a ‘Sapir-style’ scenario. This was named after the Belgian economist André Sapir who, in 2003, drew up a highly controversial report for the Commission, which recommended a Cohesion Policy almost exclusively for regions in the new member states. For the Commission, a regional policy addressed to all is especially necessary since challenges, such as globalisation and climate change, affect the whole of the European Union – the EU15 as much as more recent members – at a time when national exchequers are stretched. There is no doubt, however, that some member states will call on the Sapir scenario in discussions on the new Cohesion Policy
During her mandate, Hübner frequently insisted on the need to strengthen the Commission’s strategic role in defining the policy to be implemented. The same idea is taken up in the Barca report. This envisages a seamless process starting with a real political debate and leading to adoption of a European framework and signature of “strategic development contracts” between the Commission, member states and, possibly, regions. In the Barca scenario, regional and local authorities would be more widely involved than today, which the Commission is also said to support. These contracts would formally commit signatories to a strategy, results and follow-up reports.
A genuine assessment for monitoring the performance of programmes and results would also need to be established – something Barca considers is lacking today. In her reflection paper, Hübner talks of setting up a “culture of monitoring and evaluation”. Commissioner Samecki also highlighted the need to concentrate further on results and performance. In this, they are slavishly following the fashion of today - and that part of McCann's presentation which dealt with this issue was positively embarrassing in its naivety and failure to relate to the wider and highly critical literature about performance management.

One of the problems about EC policy-making is that, despite (perhaps because of??) the emphasis on transparency and consultation, the processes are conducted by insiders - many of them paid by the EC itself (academics and not a few journalists). Outsiders like myself are discouraged by the language, complexity and sheer volume of paper. It would be interesting to spend some time reading the relevant stuff on Structural Funds (regional policy, social funds, coherence et al) and explore some basic questions about Value Added!!!

EC Structural Funds - Cui Bono?

2012-01-26T10:07:00.006+02:00

I'm cocooned at the moment in a cosy flat in a wind-swept and snow-bound concrete block in down-town Bucharest.

The ever-watchful Open Europe operation has targeted two big elements of EC spending in reports just out – on Structural Funds and its Development (or “external” assistance). Its report on the latter subject has been drafted for the UK House of Commons Select Committee on International Development which has started an investigation of the EC’s Development Assistance budget. In combination with Member States’ own aid budgets the EU as a whole provides 60% of global Official Development Assistance (ODA) making it the largest donor. "Despite some improvements", the Committee says, "concerns have been expressed about the effectiveness of EC development assistance, the slow disbursal of aid, the geographical distribution of EC aid and poor coordination between Member States".
This blog (and papers on my website) have also made a more detailed critique in relation to its state-building programmes in transition countries. The committee points out that

Total EC external assistance in 2010 was €11.1 billion. The UK share of this was approximately €1.66. A new Commission policy paper, “An Agenda for Change” was published in October 2011 for approval by the Council in May 2012. At the same time, negotiations are proceeding for the Multi-Annual Financial Framework, and the replenishment of the European Development Fund. Together these will set the parameters for EC development aid from 2014-2020. The Committee invites evidence on:
• The comparative advantage of the EU as a channel for UK development and humanitarian assistance and the UK’s ability to influence EU development policy;
• The proposals set out in the “Agenda for Change”;
• The proposals for future funding of EC development cooperation;
• Progress towards policy coherence for development in climate change, global food security, migration, intellectual property rights and security.

The Open Europe paper is a fairly political briefing on the issues of geographical distribution, administration (costs and waste), EC “value-added” and policy issues (eg questionable reliance on budgetary support) – but seems to have been written by epople with little familiarity with the field of development work.

Its other paper – on EC Structural Funds - is a rather better one which actually looks at what the research has actually tells us about the success over the years of this funding in dealing with its basic objective – namely reducing regional differentials within countries. The answer is "difficult to prove”. Of course, the 60 billion euros a year programme is now more about building up the missing technical and social infrastructures of new member States and the paper argues that this should be properly recognised by the richer member states being taken aut of the programme’s benefits. The paper reminds that

the previous UK Labour Government proposed limiting the funds to EU member states with income levels below 90% of the EU average and suggests that this could create a win-win situation. Such a move would instantly make the funds easier to manage and tailor around the needs of the poorest regions in the EU. The paper estimates that 22 or 23 out of 27 member states would also either pay less or get more out of the EU budget, as the funds are no longer transferred between richer member states.

Structural Funds are, however, an important political tool for those committed to "the European project” in developing and sustaining clienteles. This should never be forgotten!

I have never been a fan of the EC Structural Funds which I have seen expand from almost nothing in the 1970s to 350 billion euros in the 2007-2113 period (60 billion a year – eg 5 billion annual contribution for UK). As a senior politician with Strathclyde Region which was the first British local authority to forge strong relations with the European Commission in the 1980s (when we had no friends at Margaret Thatcher’s court), you might imagine that I was positive about the European funding which we then received. In fact, I was highly critical – mainly for the dishonesty of the claims made about its net benefits. The British Treasury simply deducted whatever we gained from our European funding from our UK funding.

The programme really expanded in the Delors era on the watch of Scottish politician Bruce Millan as Regional Commissioner (1989-1994). In those days, we believed in regional development. In my own case, it was my whole intellectual raison d’ etre! The subject was coming into its own academically – and it was indeed the subject I first focussed on in my own academic career (before I moved into public management). It spawned thousands of university departments and degrees many of which seem still – despite public spending cuts - frozen in institutional landscapes. And I have never seen an intellectual questioning of what it has brought us – although I did recently come across this short critical article on the related field of urban development.

This Open Letter by some prominent Hungarians has just been published about the situation in that country - and is a useful briefing on the issues - as is this EuroTribune one. When I worked in that country, I vividly remember one of my older Hungarian colleagues telling me that she hoped that, this time, the country might actually succeed in something - since the history of her country to that point seemed to have consisted of a series of failures.She must be crying herself to sleep these nights!

The cartoon is one of Honore Daumier's - "The Gargantuan". At times like these, we are in desperate need of the caustic insights of the likes of Daumier, Goya, Kollwitz et al - and those influenced by them such as the Bulgarian caricaturists of the early and mid- part of the last century.

Scintillating writing

2012-01-25T12:07:00.005+02:00

Left the Sirnea valley (1,400 metres up) not a moment too soon – with heavy snow being forecast even in Bucharest and the southern plain. But not before I had made a special trip to buy 4 kilos of the pungent home-made burdurf from my neighbours down the hill – for my money the place they make the best cheese in the Balkans. Initially with a strong cheddar taste, it matures into a variety of classic cheeses – depending on where you keep it. I’ve known it as a variant of an Italian Parma but, when stuffed into jars and kept in the cellar, it comes out as a juicy, pallat-blowing Pont L ‘Eveque French cheese. I felt like an urban coward as I abandoned the hardy villagers to the winter conditions – and excused myself with reference to the lack of water (from which several other houses too high up the hillside were also suffering) and also with my hacking chest cough .
Morning did indeed dawn with blustering winds and snow blanketing the cars. So the planned visit to a Black Sea workshop is off.
Instead I immersed myself in Chris Hitchins’ Hitch 22 - a Memoir which had arrived last year in Sirnea and whose first half covers exactly my own period of growing up and coming to political consciousness in Britain. I made no reference to his death last month – partly because I was somewhat offended that it eclipsed the obituaries of Vaclaw Havel. Whatever one may think of the man, he was a magnificent writer who captures so well in this book the nature of Britain the 1960s and 1970s - whether it was the totalitarian system run by the pupils of schools who have groomed the offspring of its governing elites for their on their own future roles; or the atmosphere and values in the local branches of the Labour Party in those days.
He became an early activist in the International Socialist movement (whose people I fought in the labour party) but then, sadly, became an apologist for American interests. In that sense, he continued the great English intellectual tradition of the earlier part of the century of switching sides. Terry Eagleton’s review of the book is a good summary of what his enemies think -

The Oedipal children of the establishment have always proved useful to the left. Such ruling-class renegades have the grit, chutzpah, inside knowledge, effortless self-assurance, stylishness, fair conscience and bloody-mindedness of their social background, but can turn these patrician virtues to radical ends. The only trouble is that they tend to revert to type as they grow older, not least when political times are lean. The Paul Foots and Perry Andersons of this world are a rare breed. Men and women who began by bellowing "Out, out, out!" end up humiliating waiters and overrating Evelyn Waugh. Those who, like Christopher Hitchens, detest a cliché turn into one of the dreariest types of them all: the revolutionary hothead who learns how to stop worrying about imperialism and love Paul Wolfowitz.
That Hitchens represents a grievous loss to the left is beyond doubt. He is a superb writer, superior in wit and elegance to his hero George Orwell, and an unstanchably eloquent speaker. He has an insatiable curiosity about the modern world and an encyclopaedic knowledge of it, as well as an unflagging fascination with himself. Through getting to know all the right people, an instinct as inbuilt as his pancreas, he could tell you without missing a beat whom best to consult in Rabat about education policy in the Atlas Mountains. The same instinct leads to chummy lunches with Bill Deedes and Peregrine Worsthorne. In his younger days, he was not averse to dining with repulsive fat cats while giving them a piece of his political mind. Nowadays, one imagines, he just dines with repulsive fat cats.

The novellist, Blake Morrisons is a more sympathetic reviewer -

The best parts of the book are those dealing with his parents – his mother, Yvonne, who committed suicide when he was 24, and his father, a former naval officer known as "the Commander". Yet even here, the polemicist is in danger of eclipsing the memoirist. "I had once thought that he'd helped me understand the Tory mentality, all the better to combat and repudiate it," he writes of his father. "And in that respect he was greatly if accidentally instructive. But over the longer stretch, I have come to realise that he taught me – without ever intending to – what it is to feel disappointed and betrayed by your 'own' side."
Hitchens began to leave home almost from infancy. A precocious child, whose first words came out as complete sentences ("Let's all go and have a drink at the club" was one of them, allegedly), he was packed off to boarding school at eight – a strain on the family budget, but if there was going to be an upper class, Yvonne wanted her son to be part of it. By 10 he knew all there was to know about dictatorships. But though beaten and bullied, he was never buggered. And there were books, starting with War and Peace and moving on to Wilfred Owen and George Orwell. When a housemaster warned him that he was in danger of "ending up a pamphleteer", he felt encouraged.
1968 was a heady year to be a student. He appeared on University Challenge, spoke at the Oxford Union and dined with government ministers. But he also held forth from upturned milk crates, organized sit-ins and was charged with incitement to riot. The spirit of the times was intoxicating but there were limits: sex and rock'n'roll were fine, but not long hair (an affront to one's working-class comrades) or drugs (a "weak-minded escapism almost as contemptible as religion").
At Oxford he met his first Americans, including Bill Clinton, who took his dope in the form of cookies rather than inhaling (and whom he accuses of snithving to the American authorities on the US draft-dodgers). Clinton aside, Hitchens admired these Americans, and he began to have a recurrent dream of finding himself in Manhattan and feeling freer for it. "Life in Britain had seemed like one long antechamber to a room that had too many barriers to entry," he writes. In truth, every door in London seemed to open to him. But the contradictions of his journalistic career were troubling ("with half of myself I was supposed to be building up the Labour movement and then with another half of myself subverting and infiltrating it from the ultra-left"), and perhaps that's what attracted him to the US, to which he flew on a one-way ticket in 1981 – here was a chance to quit the British class struggle and be wholly himself.
There's a lot to argue with here. But to take issue with Hitchens you will need to be formidably prepared (as widely read, widely travelled and rhetorically astute as he is) and to forget the idea that he "only does it to annoy", out of contrariness rather than conviction. You'll have to sharpen your invective, too. Humour is one of his deadliest weapons and there's plenty on display, some of it gently directed at himself

For those who want to hear the text itself, Utube has serialised the entire book (although I can't get any sound!)

Back to basics

2012-01-22T18:43:00.001+02:00

The northern skies looked more promising as light came to Ploiesti and, after de-icing, the car headed to the mountains at 09.15 and started to encounter the snow at the royal station of Sinaii – or rather its branch of Pennywise.
But the roads were good – even up past Bran and Moiecu - and only got problematic on the village track where passing returning weekenders was a tight squeeze between the piles of snow at the sides of the road.
Impossible to park in my usual places in the village – so I eventually skidded up to the hotel car-park and abandoned the car there.

Walking – let alone carrying the stuff I’m starting to transfer from the Sofia flat – in the metre of snow (almost) which now blankets the fields is a real test of fitness!

The new road which lies now at the foot of our garden was, of course, both impassible and invisible – but I did notice that we had lost the gate which did allow the car onto the garden slope on the odd ocassion the track was dry enough to get me far enough to the house.

I was carrying so much in the car (books, wine, rakia, 7 paintings and an old carpet) that I had not wanted to add the camera – and now regret it. The old house was looking fantastic – with lights from all 6 windows on the middle level casting a superb glow as I struggled up the hill from the old neighbours who greeted me so warmly (and with hot tuica).

We have, however, no water – and no gas (a split canister?). But the kitchen fire quickly spread warmth – and gave the necessary heat for soup et al. The cat – who was last here in late September – seems glad to be back in the nooks and crannies but doesn’t quite know what to make of the metre of snow.

The European future

2012-01-22T08:28:00.000+02:00

Venturing north now on the last stage of this trip - to see how the mountain house is coping with the weather. I fear some frozen pipes since I proably lost some anti-gel in last year's tap split and leak.

I referred a couple of weeks ago to the debate about the future of Europe in the Eurozine network. Ywo more interesting pieces by Swedish authors are now available - Per Wirten’s Where were you when Europe fell apart?

In his book, Ill Fares the Land, Tony Judt predicted that neoliberal agitation for a "minimal state" would cease after the crash in 2008 and be replaced by the return of the state and a battle about its characteristics: should it be democratic or authoritarian, kindly or malevolent, based on surveillance or trust? He turned out to be right. That battle is being fought already.
The longstanding, wishful call for "more Europe" has been converted into a meaningless platitude. Sharper, more focused opinions are now necessary: the parliament must be the engine of politics, the Commission must submit to the will of the parliament, social responsibility and a redistributive policy from wealthy to poor regions must become a reality – otherwise there is no future either for the euro or the European idea .

and Bjoern Elmbrant’s Whose Europe are we living in?

The euro crisis has shown that this is the Europe of the big nations at the small nations' expense, the Europe of banks rather than of citizens. Instead of demanding that their own banks take responsibility, imposing debt rescheduling and a higher equity, Merkel and Sarkozy have rigged what critics call a "fake debate". What was in fact the consequences of the financial crisis of 2008 has instead been described as the result of budgetary indiscipline. Although this might be true for Greece and possibly Portugal, countries such as Ireland and Spain had a large budget surplus and low national debt when Lehman Brothers crashed in 2008......

It is a Europe characterized by increasing nationalism. Just like during the Weimar republic in Germany in the 1920s, today's nationalism is kindled by political ineffectiveness and an economically strapped petit bourgeoisie. The issue concerns not only the new poverty in indebted countries in the south. In northern Europe, the margins of the middle class are gradually getting smaller – deep in debt, they no longer think that solidarity is something they can afford.
Nationalism is the next-door neighbour of selfishness and self-interest. We see rightwing populism at work also when popular and intelligible EU reforms are made void, for example when the Danish People's Party reintroduced controls at the borders to Germany and Sweden. Border controls can now also be "temporarily" reinforced in other parts of the union "in extreme situations". If countries are allowed to decide for themselves what an extreme situation might be, Schengen belongs to the past.
Migration issues are a Pandora's box, if you open it just a little, hatred and dirt emerge. We are now seeing that box opening

Is Europe democratic, then? Less and less. Swedish political scientist Sverker Gustavsson has described three conditions for democracy to work: democracy must "deliver", i.e. be able to solve problems; democracy must admit that there are various routes and that opposition is legitimate; and democracy must be predictable, not arbitrary.
If we use these criteria to test the way the euro crisis has been handled, the result is discouraging. The ability to solve problems is weak. Mistakes have been made and decisions have been wrong and ill-timed. Fear of a free debate about the financial markets has resulted in politicians lying – this has been admitted. But how do you make citizens interested in an imminent crisis when there are no clear alternatives and when politicians don't dare to tell the truth? Finally, there has been a lack of predictability, as the EU keeps changing its stand, adopting ideas it rejected one month earlier. Paragraph 125 of the Lisbon treaty stipulated that no rescue packages were to be allowed, but then rescue packages were issued. It is forbidden for the ECB to buy government bonds from countries in crisis, yet this has been done through the back door.

The fact that indebted countries are now governed by "guardians" is also harmful to democracy. These countries lose their sovereignty as austerity measures are forced onto them from above and devaluation is not an option. Schools are shut down. Hospitals reduce the number of operations. Salaries are cut. Pensions are cut. State property is sold off. In Greece there is talk of selling off "cultural goods". Are we talking about the Parthenon here? Where is the respect?
The question why the citizens should bow down to decree is legitimate. Especially when they have hardly been able to influence these measures, for which there is no majority within the population. The sense of powerlessness is a breeding ground for large-scale rightwing populism. The design of the euro not only threatens the EU but democracy in general.......
And so we have been left with a European Union dominated by the German obsession with budget discipline. There is nothing wrong with having your budget in order, but in turn it has paved the way for a neoliberal agenda and the argument that we have too much welfare

Romanian paintings

2012-01-20T20:57:00.012+02:00

Januaries in Bucharest were bitterly cold and snowy a decade or so ago. I remember the snow covering cars in the mid-1990s. These days it was just a bit nippy as I zipped through the various bookshops – and took in the incredible (renovated) palace which now houses the Artmark auctioneers at C Rossetti 5. I have to say that such opulence (and staffing) completely turns me off. It simply shows the huge mark-up they must put on the paintings they sell. Although the prices seem a bit more reasonable than they were, there were in fact no paintings which interested me in those displayed for the 26 January auction which, this time, includes quite a bit of the Ceaucescu family possessions and memorabilia which you can see in the catalogue on the site which can be downloaded. It brought back the memory of the (private) visit I was able to make in 1990 to the richly-endowed mansion the couple had at the back of the Peles palace in Sinaii. Gold-plated bath taps no less - at a time when the population was starving! I had good connections in those days as I was working for WHO - which had been in with the old governments! I was there to show a new face - and explore new possibilities. Which I did in the gloom and in the front of an ambulance which was the means of transport for the young doctor who took me around the country.

The ArtMark auction paintings were hiding the gallery's more interesting permanent exhibition. Better to visit between auctions!

I had noticed in the Humanitas bookshop a new book (rather pricey at 25 euros) on a superb classic Romanian painter unknown to me Camil Ressu (born 1880) A good video of his portrait work is available here.
But I was persuaded to buy in Artmark a fascinating and well-crafted 300 page plus book (in English) – The Self-Punishing One; arts and Romania in the 1980s and 1990s on the works and times of 3 uncompromising Romanian artists (Stefan Bertalan; Florin Mitroi, Ion Grigorescu). How writers coped with the "communist" repression is a common theme of discussions (I mentioned the Herda Mueller exchange here in November recently) but I come across discussions about the effects on artistic endeavours much less frequently. The only thing I can find online on a similar theme is in German.

Whence to the experience of visiting the Ploesti Art Gallery – The "Ion Ionescu-Quintus" Art Museum of Prahova county's activity, with the two departments, Art Museum Ploieşti and Memorial House of painter Nicolae Grigorescu in Câmpina, in accordance with the Law 311/2003 to give it its proper title (needed if you are to find it on the internet!). It is housed in a splendiferous palace in Ploiesti’s centre - which is a large city 50 kms north of Bucharest on the main highway to the Carpathians and Europe. Its oil resources gave it strategic and economic importance at the beginning of the 20th century – evident in some of the architectural gems which can be seen if you look hard enough. Josef Isser is perhaps the city’s most famous artistic son although the country’s most famous painter (Nicolae Grigorescu) comes from the county (Prahova) and is also well represented in the gallery’s collection - as is Theodor Pallady.
However, we apparently arrived at an inopportune time – 15.50 Friday – and got no response when we rang the bell as requested. The security guard was concerned – not least because an alarm was ringing - and ran around the building a couple of times before assuring us that the gallery was open until 17.00. After 10 minutes I was depositing my business card with a message of disappointment when the huge door suddenly opened and a surprised-looking woman explained – to the security guy not us – that there was no electricity although the lights appeared a few seconds after her “explanation”. Thereafter the usual shrill altercation between Romanian custodians and citizens – with no sense from the former that any apologies were due. And a special graphic exhibition had taken over the building – with only half a dozen of the permanent exhibits being on display. The (European) graphics had been hung so low that it was very difficult to see their detail. The best feature for me was the building - with superb entrance hall, painted ceilings and old and fully-functioning tiled stoves keeping the rooms at their required temperature. We were supposed to pay 2 euros – but somehow managed to emerge without payment. Another typical Romanian experience of public services!

Two courageous speeches

2012-01-20T18:42:00.000+02:00

I have admired – if not envied - the German political system since I first encountered it in the 1960s as a student – and was able in the 1970s and 1980s, on my various European trips, to compare the seriousness with which politicians (national and regional) were taken in Germany (eg the interviews in the weekly Der Spiegel magazine) with the shallow and elitist coverage of the London media. Willy Brandt and Helmut Schmidt were both, in their very distinct ways, inspiring Chancellors – and their Green politicians blazed a trail.
Helmut Schmidt (age 92) came out of retirement in December and gave a very powerful address to his Social democrat colleagues about Europe. It’s worth watching (in German) and reading (in English) – first for what he says about German responsibilities -

For all our surpluses in reality constitute the deficits of the other nations. The claims that we have on others are their debts. It is a case of undesirable damage being done to what was once elevated by us to a statutory ideal: »external balance«. This damage must unnerve our partners. And when foreign, mostly American, voices – then they came from all quarters – have been heard to call for Germany to take the leading role, all this together causes further unease in our neighbours. And it revives bad memories.
This economic development and the simultaneous crisis in the ability of the organs of the European Union have continued to force Germany into a central role. Together with the French president, the Chancellor has accepted this role willingly. However, there has appeared in many European capitals and likewise in the media of many of our neighbours a growing concern about German dominance. This time it is not a question of an overly strong military and political central power, but rather of an overly powerful economic centre.
At this point, it is necessary for a serious and carefully considered warning for our politicians, our media and our public opinion to be issued.
If we Germans allow ourselves to be seduced into claiming a political leading role in Europe or at least playing first among equals, based on our economic strength, an increasing majority of our neighbours will effectively resist this. The concern of the periphery about an all too powerful European centre would soon come racing back. The possible consequences of such a development would be crippling. And Germany would fall into isolation.
The very large and very capable German Federal Republic needs – if only to protect us from ourselves – to be embedded in European integration. For this reason, ever since 1992 and the times of Helmut Kohl, article 23 of our constitution obligates us to cooperate »with the development of the European Union«. Article 23 obligates us as part of this cooperation to the »principle of subsidiarity«. The present crisis regarding the ability of EU organs does not change these principles.
Our geopolitically central location and, in addition, our unfortunate role in European history in the first half of the twentieth century and our current capacity, all these things together demand from every German government a very large measure of sympathy towards the interests of our EU partners. And our willingness to help is essential.
We Germans have indeed not achieved our great reconstruction of the last sixty years alone and through our own might. Rather it would not have been possible without the aid of the Western victorious powers, without our involvement in the European Community and the Atlantic Alliance, without the aid of our neighbours, without the political break up of eastern Central Europe and without the end of the communist dictatorship. We Germans have reason to be grateful. And likewise we have the duty to show ourselves worthy of the solidarity we received through providing our own solidarity towards our neighbours.

As for what he says about the financial measures Europe needs to take -

The governments of the entire world in 2008/2009 saved the banks with guarantees and taxpayers’ money. Ever since 2010, however, this flock of highly intelligent (but also prone to psychoses) financial managers have continued to play their old game of profit and bonification. In any event, the countries that participate in the common European currency should join together to put into practice far-reaching regulations of their common financial markets. Regulations to separate normal commercial banks from investment and shadow banks, to ban the short selling of securities at a future date, to ban trade in derivatives, provided they are not approved by the official stock exchange supervisory body, and regulations for the effective restriction of transactions that affect the Euro area and are carried out by the currently unsupervised ratings agencies

And it was remiss of me not to have mentioned before now the courageous speech given in Berlin in November by the Polish Foreign Secretary who dared also to talk about German responsibilities, Here are some of the responses.

Romania's demonstrations - in perspective

2012-01-20T07:58:00.003+02:00

Monday’s blogpost carried an excerpt (and heading) from The Economist magazine’s Eastern Approaches blog about apparent riots in Romania. After visiting the location here in Bucharest of the demonstrations and reading both the (Romanian) comments on the Economist blogpost and local papers, I think the Economist got the balance wrong. One of the discussants put it well -

1. The violence was limited in scope and intensity. It is now clear that it was provoked by fans of two football teams (Dinamo, Steaua) as a reaction against a recently enacted law requiring violent supporters to register with police stations before the match. The picture and the title suggests that the protests were very violent and much broader than they were in fact. The leaders of these football fans organizations made it very clear in the press they were not interested in politics and that their agenda was different.

2. Protests themselves are small in scope. It seems that at the peak, they were not more than 1,500 (more like 1,200) in Bucharest. Very few of them can explain the reasons they are protesting for. This is very typical for Occupy-type movements. Bucharest population is well over 2 mil. Also typical to Occupy-type movements, the are slogans are EQUALLY directed against opposition (USL) and government (PDL+UDMR). Some protesters are what you'd define as anti-globalization (against what they believe is new world order etc., you know the story), some are against the Rosia Montana gold mining project, some are from animal protection NGOs etc. The crowd is very colourful.
3. Protesters have been summoned by USL (socialists+liberals, the opposition). There are evidences on all major newspapers (check www.evz.ro). Some were called by SMS etc. The protests turned against opposition as well (they booed when Orban appeared).
4. About protests in other cities,In Iasi, major city, 320,000 (20-120 protesters):
In Craiova, major city of 300,000 population (<100 protesters)
5. Don't use sources such as Realitatea TV or Antena 3. They have a known political agenda for years. They compare with FoxNews, just that they are much worse. There are so many other sources. Since so much of the press is somehow connected politically, you should use as many different sources as possible. Just to give you an idea: Realitatea TV was showing the case of a retired military earning 500 EUR/month (state pension), WHILE at the same time being employed as assistant professor in some (private? I don't remember) university and earning a salary. He committed suicide because he was too poor. They were over-dramatising this episode.
As far as I could find out, only the pensions of the military personnel have been trimmed. These were huge anyway (more than 1,500 RON, I'd guess on average 2,000 RON?). Many of the military employees have received early retirement when joining NATO (probably out of fears that they may still be connected to KGB structures); the Romanian army was considered as oversized. They have received large pensions and many of them have IN ADDITION other jobs, since they are still relatively young (I have examples in the family). This group has been very vocal lately. Some participants in the 1989 events were receiving special pensions as well, apart from other privileges (free land etc.). Apparently these pensions were large and have been trimmed.

One additional remark: The Economist blog ran a story some time ago (entitled Can an Englishman rent his castle?) showing that in Romania very few live in rented flats, very few have mortgages (these are essentially the high-income earners). Most people own outright their homes and the housing costs are very low. The situation is not that bleak. There are other, more complex social and psychological problems affecting the population.

Some typical Bucharest encounters

2012-01-18T21:00:00.005+02:00

Some typical Bucharest experiences in the first 24 hours.
Paying bills – first for flat administration, always 2 months in arrears and in inscrutable handwritten notes with all the memory complications this involves – 75 euros for 2 months in our case (water, heating, common facilities (incl. cleaning, lifts and concierge).
Then for 3 months cable TV (10 euros a month); and internet (ditto).
It was the latter (Vodaphone) which caused the most stress. Their shops are superbly equipped – but often abominably managed by youngsters who are simply incapable of putting themselves in their customers’ shoes (and this also goes for their managers). When you are enter, you see a row of desks/counters scattered casually to left and right. If you are particularly observant, you will see, on your left, a machine with multiple choices - one of which you are supposed to punch to get a numbered ticket. That’s not as easy as it sounds since it offers about 6 choices and you have to understand what, for example, a personal legal entity is! I was, however, looking to solve a problem with my internet contract (out of the country for 3 months, disconnected and facing surcharges) . I could see an “internet” label and was duly presented with a number. Trouble was that only one of the 7 desks I could see was displaying electronic numbers and, when I approached desks for clarification, I got no real help. “We’ll call out the numbers” one guy said – but, of course, this was done in Romanian and not all distinctly.
After a 10 minutes’ wait and a second rebuttal from the only desk which was managing to deal with customers, I asked to see the manager to whom I suggested some more (customer) effective management systems. “Look, I said, these two desks have been tied up for the last 15 minutes with customers buying hardware. Why don’t you have a desk which deals with customer queries?” “And how on earth am I supposed to understand to go when I come in – with only one of the 4 desks being manned actually dsiplaying its electronic numbers?”
After a philosophical discussion about the difference between management and efficiency, the guy confessed that they paid no attention to customer waiting time. “But”, I protested, “we customers do!”

This was clearly a Pauline moment in the 30- year old manager’s life. “You may well have a point”, he conceded, “I will talk to my staff”. I have to remember this is the country of Ionesco!
He offered no personal help for my simple query – and I departed with a strong warning that I was a disgruntled customer who would now write a formal letter of complaint to the Vodaphone management.
At another branch (Bvd Magheru), I had a much more helpful reception – and was led to understand that (a) I had (in the usual smallprint) signed a contract which rolled over automatically after the year’s expiry; (b) it could not be cancelled until I paid the outstanding charges (20 euros); and (c) that a facility was now available to allow me to buy a monthly prepaid card for only 10 euros a month.
What a contrast! Hats off to that Magheru guy!

In between this, I stumbled first on a small art gallery which, at last, seems to cater for my taste here in Romania – with quite a few Bessarabian painters at similar prices to the Bulgarian galleries (the ratio has generally been 5-1)
And, then, in the Carturesti bookshop, a back collection of London Review of Books; and Times Literary Supplements! Enough to make a guy like me climax! I emerged with 10 of them – and will be back for more.
And I also came away with a superb bilingual edition of TS Eliot poetry – the last part of which covers The Four Quartets.

In between all this, I dropped in to see the hard-core of the demonstrators still demanding, at Piata Universitate, the government;s resignation - after the victory of the (Palestinian) Deputy- State Secretary of Health who had resigned in protest last week after the attempt to privatise the emergency service system he had put in place and had been managing for the past 20 years. It is quite amazing that that thousands of ordinary Romanian citizens in 40 cities turned out spontaneously to support him!

By the way, when I tried to give the reference to Ionescu. I learned that Wikipedia are on srike for a day in order to draw our attention to the threat to internet freedom from a bill currently being considered by the American Congress. A very good tactic by Wikipedia - bringing home to us how much we depend on this spontaneous system! For more on the serious implications of the Bill see here.

Memory corner.
Some great US winter paintings from a century ago at this great painting blog; and, as I head to Transylvania at the weekend, an old post about the traditional farming system there.

Neglect of Bulgarian painting patrimony

2012-01-18T15:56:00.001+02:00

We reached Razgrad via a quiet country road from Targovishte with the sparkling snow fading as we hit the vineyards. Razgrad is a fairly isolated town of 40-50,000 people lying on the plain between Russe on the Danube and Varna on the Black Sea. Its town centre is clean and lively – with the huge mosque (which I have on one of my paintings) acting as the centre for the pedestrian area in which the attractive and modern-looking municipal gallery is located.
Typically however, it being 12.10, it was closed for the long lunch break and – despite the seductive poster advertising a special exhibition – we moved on for Russe on the basis that we could visit next week when a workshop is being held nearby.

I’ve wanted to visit the Russe municipal gallery for some time – the town, after all, has more than 200,000 people; has been an important port on the Danube for a long time; and has a proud tradition of culture – with quite a few well-known painters to its name eg Marko Monev. And the gallery was not difficult to find – the girls in the OBV petrol station at the central station roundabout knew it was just round the corner. However the gallery is in a scandalous state for such a city – with (a) no heating and (b) the paintings in one of the three rooms lying propped on the floor with no means of identification. Unlike all the other regional galleries I’ve visited in Bulgaria, the Russe one charges for entrance – OK only 50 pence - but that does raise expectations a little. No Monev paintings were on display but there were some superb works from Vladimir Dmitrov-Maistera, Atanas Mihov, Benchko Obreshkov and Nenko Balkanski – all, however, at risk from the disgraceful conditions. What was even more galling was that an expensive book was on offer – at 25 euros – celebrating 75 years of the gallery. It must have cost 5,000 euros to produce – money which would have been much better spent to keep the paintings in a safer condition.
I can understand the galleries of smaller municipalities being in poor conditions – but there is asolutely no excuse for this neglect for a city such as Russe. Places like Razgrad and Kazanlak – with one fifth of the population – clearly do so much better! Pity the poor young warden who sat wrapped up and freezing in his cubicle as I happily snapped the choicer exhibits.
What sort of future does he have? He shrugged his shoulders when I asked about the Monev paintings – and smiled sadly when I asked if there was a feedback book available for me to make my comments! At the very least, the city authorities should relocate the paintings to a smaller place which is easier to heat! And it doesn’t take much money to produce a CD of the gallery collection.
Of course art galleries are a municipal responsibility and rightly so. And the Sofia and Kazanluk galleries show what can be done by committed local authorities and staff – with both organising special exhibitions and having a range of products (including CDs) for sale. But the protection of Bulgarian painting patrimony is surely a national issue.

Disturbances in Romania?

2012-01-16T21:39:00.003+02:00

Tomorrow, weather conditions allowing (we had 7 cms of snow this afternoon), we drive north to Bucharest. It’s less than 150 kms and fairly flat (via Razgrad and across the Danube at Russe) and would normally not be a problem. What we will find in Bucharest is beginning to worry us – with riots apparently taking an increasing hold. An Economist blog gives what seems a fairly neutral report - "

POLENTA doesn't explode" is the gnomic phrase Romanians use to describe the attitude of resigned acceptance typical to the country. But this weekend something snapped. Thousands of people took to the streets in Bucharest and 40 other towns, venting their anger at their leaders' perceived incompetence in dealing with Romania's economic crisis.
The centre of Bucharest was hit by violence on a scale unseen in two decades. Traian Băsescu, the centre-right president, is the main target of the protesters' ire. "Get out, you miserable dog" they chanted, as they hurled paving stones and smoke bombs at riot police. Water cannons and tear gas were used to dispel the crowds.
The immediate trigger for the riots was the resignation of Raed Arafat, a popular official in the health ministry, who stepped down after clashing with Mr Băsescu over a set of controversial reforms to the health-care system. Mr Boc has now offered to revise the plans, and offered an olive branch to Mr Arafat.
The Palestinian-born doctor, who emigrated to Romania in the 1980s, had helped set up a professional medical emergency system. He disagreed with a government proposal to privatise it, as part of its drive to cut public spending. "Quality does not automatically arrive with privatisation. For the patient, the system will be weaker," he said announcing his resignation. A day earlier Mr Băsescu had called Mr Arafat a liar on television, adding that he had "leftist" views.
Mr Băsescu is well known for his undiplomatic, mercurial manner. On Friday, however, as peaceful pro-Arafat demonstrations spread throughout the country, the president asked the government to pull its draft health-care law. He blamed "media manipulation" and was unable to resist noting sarcastically that "the emergency system works perfectly."

Much more graphic coverage from a very committed outsider can be seen here. In fact, if you follow the discussion thread of the Economist post, the reality (as always in Romania) seem rather more complex - if not prosaic. I hope to come back to this later in the week.

Cultural diversions
The Targovishte Art Gallery has a rather remote location (at least for present wintry conditions) in a park on the town’s periphery next to a lake which must be glorious in summer (and also to the football stadium). From the outside its cavernous size held some promise – but this was quickly dashed by the iciness of the air as we stepped inside. There was no heating (and loud leaks from the roofs) for the Gallery’s 2 huge rooms – which held little of interest. One Neron and one Svetlin Russe which must be fast deteriorating in such conditions.

Celebrating national bards

2012-01-16T07:53:00.005+02:00

A positive glow from the snow-bound fields around Sofia as we headed east on the smooth Highway which cuts a swathe through the Balkans; then on a French-type RN to and past Veliko Trnovo (where the snow was thinner).
By then we were picking up Romanian Radio which was celebrating the birthday of Romania’s most famous poet Mihai Eminiscu (1850-1899) whose star diminished somewhat after 1989 – at least amongst the intellectuals who questioned his simplistic nationalism. But ordinary people stuck with his love poetry . Next week, all over the world, wherever there is (or has been) a small congregation of Scots, our national bard, Rabbie Burns (1759-1796) , is celebrated at dinners with poetry, whisky, speeches and music. Apparently during the Cold War one of the greatest celebrations was in Moscow – since Burns’ egalitarianism was held in high regard there. I was never into this when in Scotland – although it was de rigeur for the members of the local elites to come together for drunken ribaldry every 25th January. But since leaving the country in 1990 I have developed a respect for his poetry – and this way of celebrating it. I even had my kilt flown over specially from Scotland for the Copenhagen dinner in 1991!
As we drove, we mused about how many other poets are celebrated in this way.

Hills and small gorges took us into Targovishte where another 2-day workshop is being held –starting the final phase of this training project on EC Structural Funds after the hiaitus caused by the November municipal elections. Unlike Northern Europe, municipal elections here can often lead to personnel changes.

Targovishte has the size (and sadness) of my home town in Scotland – 60,000 people and its first traces are from the 16 C when it had the name Eski Djumaya. In the 18th century its market offered access to the Turkish Empire dealing with Austria, Germany, England, Russia and Middle East. At the time of the Bulgarian revival the first economical college was established here – as well as many churches and libraries, the crafts, trade, tobacco industry are grown. In 1934 it was named Targovishte. In 1959 the town become the administrative centre of the region. Sunday it looked totally desolate – apart from a small area some of whose traditional, revival houses have been beautifully restored.
The hotel nestles in an attractive woody and grassed park at the bottom of hills outside the town - and the architect has superbly exploited the site with the large lobby windows giving full advantage of the view. The young staff are as courteous as I always find them in this country - and the food and (famed) local wine as excellent as usual.

user-friendly cities - a missing argument

2012-01-14T15:00:00.004+02:00

A visit last week to the office which manages the project I lead here led to another interesting conversation with one of the many pleasant young Bulgarians one finds here in consultancies, academia and foundations. As always, there was a surprised reaction to my characterisation of Sofia as one of Europe’s best capital cities. I gushed – as I usually do – about the charm of central Sofia –

with only a couple of high-rise buildings, its small shops, narrow streets, trams and atmosphere, the owners on the doorstep with a coffee and cigarette talking with friends; with its parks and buskers with their retro music.
Of course the downside of such charm is that those (young and old) who run the tiny vegetable, dressmakers, tricotage (thread); hairdresser shops and various types of galleries barely make a living. How many of them are rented, I wonder, and therefore vulnerable to landlord rental hikes and commercial redevelopment?
And I wonder how many of those who engage in this sort of soulless redevelopment realise what they are destroying – the sheer pleasure of wandering in friendly and attractive neighbourhoods. Is there nothing which can counter this Mammon? Do the city authorities realise what an asset they have? If so, are they doing anything about it? The lady mayor is certainly a huge improvement on her predecessor who, I was told yesterday, used to charge significant sums for those who wanted an audience with him to discuss their problems.

Mayor Jordanka has introduced traffic-free days; cleared many cars from the pavements and created bike lanes (where Denmark, Germany and Netherlands have blazed a trail). Here she is with a new Deputy Mayor who was, until October 2011, Deputy Minister of Culture

But have her advisers looked to the examples from Italian cities - whose city fathers well understood the treasures for which they had responsibility - and introduced regulations, decades ago, which made it very difficult to change the commercial use of centrally-located shops. Banks and mobile phone shops are an abomination – and should be located in side-streets (like whore-houses).
We need to understand the reasons which have produced such soulless, homogeneous monstrosities in so many European cities. The explanation is generally simple - a combination of political pygmies and professional advisers seduced by commercial interests. Their fall-back argument is the loss of municipal revenue from freezing commercial useage which serves the needs of the average citizen – as against the fickle purchases of young, transient, gentrifying residents who resemble so much the destructive Genghis Khan hordes who swarmed through these areas centuries before.

So, those who respect this human-scale really do need to meet this argument. I've mentioned several times the writings of Paul Kingsnorth who is one of the few people to deal with this isse. Even he, however, has not dealt with this central question.

European Failure - of knowledge management

2012-01-12T10:14:00.007+02:00

I want to return to a theme which I have mentioned several times on the blog – the apparent absence in English-language texts (whether books, journals or blogs) of analysis of the many positive models of socio-economic practice which can be found in European countries such as France, Germany, Netherlands and Scandinavia. There are many academic texts on the history and politics of these countries – and many academic journals devoted to their literary or political aspects. But they are all academic in tone and style and highly specialised – although I seem to recollect from the 1990s a few academic journals which had more open content and style eg West European Politics; Journal of Democracy; Governance – an international journal of policy, administration and institutions; and Government and Opposition. However a quick look at the titles of their current issues suggests that they have, in the meantime, become very specialised and recondite.
Where, therefore, do you now turn if you want to learn on a regular basis (and in clear analytical text) either about success stories of, for example, organisational change or social policy in these countries or, even more interestingly, about how exactly that success was achieved ?

Few books are written about such matters written, at any rate, in a style calculated to appeal to the average activist or journalist. The book market caters for universities (a large niche market) - or for the general public. University course are specialised - so we get a lot of books and journals on public management reform - but almost nothing on comparative policy outputs (although a fair amount on the process of comparative policy-making - but very badly written). My fairly simple question and focus falls in the cracks and therefore gets no coverage. A good example of market-failure!
Eurozine is a rare website which does bring articles by thinkers of all European nations together in one place – sometimes under a thematic umbrella - and has received several honourable mentions on this blog. But the papers don’t deal with policy mechanics – but operate at a more rarified level of philosophical discourse.

Of course one of the roles played by many Think Tanks is to bring appropriate foreign experience to the notice of opinion-makers in their countries – but this is generally done in a partial and superficial way since most Think Tanks these days are associated with a political party and have an axe to grind. Experience is selected to fit an agenda – and the positive aspects are stressed.eg the one on Free Schools which came out in 2009. Those interested in the role of Think Tanks (and how they have become politicised) could usefully read the paper Scholars, Dollars and Policy Advice by James McGann (2004) the doyen of the field on the American side; Think Tanks in policy-making - do they matter ? from the Friedrich Ebert Foundation (September 2011) which is a good and up-to-date European perspective; and Recycling Bins, Garbage Cans or Think Tanks ? Three Myths about policy analysis institutes by Diane Stone (2007) who is the European doyenne of the field.

Then there are, of course, the EC and OECD networks and exchanges which do go into depth on the whole range of concerns of governments – whether the policies and systems of health and education; systems of public management ; or « wicked » problems such as social exclusion. But the extensive results of their work are not easily available – OECD puts most of theirs behind a paywall and few of the EC network outputs are placed in the public domain.

It is here that the mainstream media fail us. Journalists can access the OECD material free-of-charge and specialist journalists equally would have no problems obtaining copies of the EC material.

If I am right about this gap (and I appeal to my readers to correct me), this is a devastating comment on the « European project ». Hundreds (if not thousands) of millions of euros have been spent on university and cultural exchanges, communications and research – and what is there which ca answer my basic need ??

The power of stories

2012-01-12T09:51:00.001+02:00

In the past few weeks, I’ve been going through the 500 pages of text and pictures which the blogging of the past 2-3 years has produced – and asking myself where exactly I am (or should be) going with it. The daily process of thinking about a particular aspect of my life’s work of tinkering with government institutions is a useful discipline. Since an early age, I have had the habit of writing critical analyses of policy initiatives – in the naive belief that this was the route to improved performance (I had forgotten that this habit led to Socrates having to drink hemlock!). Many of my reflections about these various efforts – whether at community, municipal, regional or national levels - are available on my website

And the daily copying of reading references – whether of journals or books – has also helped build up a useful virtual library. As, however, Umberto Eco has remarked – the beauty of a good library is that only a minority of the texts have actually been read!

The question with which I am now wrestling is whether to continue with this process – a bit like the 5- minute Thought of the Day programme which the BBC has been running for decades – or to take time out to read more closely the material in the library and try to write something more focussed and coherent. My blogposts reflect the gadfly which is (and has been) an important part of me – alighting for some time on a flower and then moving on to another.
It is, however, the process of going over my blogs which has made me realise how much value I place on the ideas embodied in books. Most people are sceptical about the power of ideas and assume that baser motives make the world go round. John Maynard Keynes opposed this vew with great elegance in 1935 when he wrote

The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed the world is ruled by little else. Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back. I am sure that the power of vested interests is vastly exaggerated compared with the gradual encroachment of ideas

But we all need to make sense of the world. Some do so with their own, home-built view of the world which, all too often, is two-dimensional if not demented. Most of us, however, seek some external guidance – but there are so many voices today that we require mediators and popularisers to help us make sense of things - whether committed journalists like Will Hutton, Paul Mason and George Monbiot; essayists such as Malcolm Gladwell and serious analytical blogs such as Daniel Little’s Understanding Society. Matthew Taylor is one of the few bloggers who, like me, has straddled the worlds of theory and practice and continues, in his role as Director of the UK Royal Society of Arts to reflect on his reading. He had a good post recently on a seminar which featured Nassim Taleb -

The event was packed out and the chairman was at pains to emphasise the powerful influence of Taleb’s ideas on Government thinking. In essence Taleb’s argument – based on a fascinating, but occasionally somewhat opaque, mixture of philosophy, statistics and metaphors – is that big systems are much more prone to catastrophic failure (or in some cases sensational success) than small devolved ones. From bankers to planners to politicians, a combination of ignorance, complacency and self-interest leads to a systematic underestimation of the inherent risk of large complex systems.

The British Prime Minister is clearly looking for a fig-leaf with which to clothe his moral nakedness and finds Taleb’s arguments a useful cover. The RSA site actually has a video of David Cameron in conversation in 2009 with Taleb when he was Opposition Leader. Taleb has many useful insights to offer. He questions our reliance on the "narrative fallacy", the way past information is used to analyse the causes of events when so much history is actually "silent". It is the silence - the gap - the missing energy in the historical system, which produces the black swan. Imagine, says Taleb, the problem of turkeys:

Every single feeding will firm up the bird's belief that it is the general rule of life to be fed every day by friendly members of the human race 'looking out for its best interests', as a politician will say. On the afternoon of the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, something unexpected will happen to the turkey. It will incur a revision of belief

Those wanting to find out more about Taleb’s arguments will find a useful paper from him on the Edge site I mentioned yesterday
Matthew Taylor then asks a powerful question on his post about the logic and consistency of the Coalition Government’s use of Taleb’s thinking -

why is a democratically accountable and relatively weak organisation like a local education authority portrayed by ministers as the kind of overbearing power that needs to be broken up while Tesco (to take just one example) is left free to grow even more powerful and major Academy chains, massive welfare to work providers and various other large scale private sector providers are encouraged?

Good writing websites

2012-01-10T12:23:00.002+02:00

Regular readers will have noticed that I have added a cloud element to the Labels (keywords) which identifies the frequency with which I have blogged on a given subject (while keeping the alpabetical listings). I have done this mainly to give the new reader a quick idea of what this blog is about. Hence, also, the sentence I have added below the masthead – to let people know that this blog does not « do » instant opinions on current events. This is part of the New Year stock-taking I spoke about yesterday. Two other new features are a "share it" facility – part of a new marketing urge I have - and a small poll which I added for a couple of days – one question only about the length of time readers stay on the site. Sadly it attracted no feedback - and I am therefore discouraged from further experimentation of this sort.

In the last few days I’ve stumbled on some great websites which connect to challenging articles on global dilemmas.
A good newspaper article reminded me about the edge website and annual question which I had forgotten about –

it sprang from the thought that to arrive at a satisfactory plateau of knowledge it was pure folly to go to Harvard University library and read six million books. Better to gather the 100 most brilliant minds in the world in a room, lock them in and have them ask one another the questions they'd been asking themselves. The expected result – in theory – was to be a synthesis of all thought. But it didn't work out that way. 100 most brilliant minds were identified and phoned. The result: 70 hung up on him! Brockman persisted with his idea, or at any rate with the notion that it might be possible to do something analogous using the internet. And so Edge.org was born as a kind of high-octane online salon with Brockman as its editor and host. He describes it as "a conversation. We look for people whose creative work has expanded our notion of who and what we are. We encourage work on the cutting edge of the culture and the investigation of ideas that have not been generally exposed."
As of now, the roll call of current and deceased members of the Edge salon runs to 660. They include many of the usual suspects (Richard Dawkins, Steven Pinker, Daniel Kahneman, Nassim Nicholas Taleb and Richard Thaler, to name just a few.)

It's a good idea - but the results, clearly depend on those asked and those who respond. My immediate feeling from a quick scan of the recent questions is that the replies are dominated by the psychologists, IT people and physicists and are skewed by the strange, highly specialiosed worls they inhabit. Why not more social scientists and management theorists??

When I was googling for critical reviews of a couple of books, I came across a serious book review site - bookforum - which offers, every few days, a collection of interesting links for selected themes - for example on a subject which greatly exercised me 20 years ago - postcommunism. This in turn led me to a useful post on the subject at another interesting site - the Monkey Cage. I’ve added the bookforum site to my list of favourite links (which I've also checked for connections). The Browser is another excellent resource which collects articles on specific themes.
Another site - Logos - is probably just a bit too academic for me and my readers.

Taking Stock

2012-01-09T13:17:00.006+02:00

A new year is a good time for taking stock of one’s life and work – so I’ve been looking at the 2011 posts on this blog which has become a new focus of work in the last 3 years (since I’ve eased off on my foreign assignments). How do they compare with my original intentions ? And are these, in fact, still useful – for me and/or my readers ? Underneath Labels and Quotes on the right hand side you will find what I originally wrote About the blog -

My generation believed that political activity could improve things - but that belief is now dead and cynicism threatens civilisation. This blog will try to make sense of the organisational endeavours I've been involved in; to see if there are any lessons which can be passed on; to restore a bit of institutional memory and social history (let alone hope).
I also read a lot and wanted to pass on the results of this to those who have neither the time nor inclination -as well as my love of painting, particularly the realist 20th century schools of Bulgaria and Belgium.
A final motive for the blog is more complicated - and has to do with life and family. What have we done with our life? What is important to us? Not just professional knowledge – but cultural and everyday passions.

On this last, I remember the disappointment when I went through my father’s papers after his death. He was a very well-read and travelled man who composed his weekly sermons with care; gave his time unstintingly to people with problems – and gave illustrated lectures throughout the country on his travels in the 1970s to off-beat places in countries such as Spain, Austria and Greece. Surely he would have left some diaries or comments behind to give a sense of his inner thoughts? But there was little beyond his jottings about some books (for some lectures he gave) and a diary about a camping holiday in the 1930s with his father. The same silence when I looked at the papers of a charismatic political colleague who was struck down in his prime.
I couldn’t hold a candle to these two men – but we are all distinctive in our way. I have been very lucky in the positions I have occupied, the places I’ve been, the people met, the range and number of books read – and, not least, gifted with a reasonable facility with and love for words and language. The least I could do was try to mix together these ingredients of experiences and insights and create a new stew which might be attractive even to those not normally inclined to eat stew?

So has the blog - with its 500 posts - so far realised its threefold intention – lessons from 40 years’ of public management interventions; sharing of the insights of others; life’s meaning and passions? Let me look at each.

Lessons from my own institutional endeavours

The early part of the blog covered the Scottish policy initiatives with which I was associated between 1970-90 such as social dialogue, open-policy-making and social inclusion – which were excerpted from a long paper available on my website.

More recently, the blog has focussed on my concerns about the technical assistance and institutional building work I have been involved with in transition countries in the past 20 years – which are captured in the paper I gave at last year’s Varna Conference of NISPAcee.

In the autumn, I had a string of 15 or so posts trying to make sense of the training work which has been the focus of recent assignment.

However my more ambitious venture to bring all of this together in one paper is not yet realised. A very early draft can be seen on my website.

Sharing the insights of others

In the din of communications, many sane voices are drowned out. And there are also a range of linguistic, professional, academic, commercial and technical filters which get in the way of even the most conscientious efforts to seek truth(s). We have slowly realised how the google search engine has an element of “mirror image” in its search – giving us more of what it thinks we want rather than what is actually available. And the specialisation of university and professional education also cuts us off from valuable sources. I’ve been lucky – in having had both the (academic) position and (political) incentive for more than 15 years to read across intellectual disciplines in the pursuit of tools to help the various ventures in which I’ve been engaged. I belong to a generation and time which valued sharing of knowledge – rather than secreting or mystifying it which has become the trend in recent decades. And I am lucky again in now having gained acess to the technical facility which allows sharing (with a copy and paste) the website references of useful papers.

Most of the blogposts contain several such links – in a single year probably 1,000 links. That’s not bad!

Indeed I have realised that this feature of my writing makes it more convenient to have my papers in electronic rather than paper form.

Life’s passions

Clearly the blog has shared several of my passions – eg painting, places, reading and wine – and has given a good sense of the enjoyment from simple activities such as wandering.

Originally the Carpathian reference in the title was to location only – it did not promise any particular insights into this part of the world. But, in the past year, my musings have broadened to give some insights into life in this part of the world…

So?
So far, so good. But perhaps the blog objectives are no longer relevant? Or a blog no longer the appropriate format? The first two blog objectives are rather altruistic – a reasonable question might be what I get out of the effort involved in drafting a significant post. The answer is – more than might think! Writing is (or should be) a great discipline. The recent Nobel prize-winner, Herta Mueller, expressed this very well in an encounter she had a year or so ago in Bucharest - It is only when I start a sentence that I find out what it has to say. I realise as I go along. So I have to somehow make words help me and I have to keep searching until I think I have found something acceptable. Writing has its own logic and it imposes the logic of language on you. There is no more "day" and "night", "outside" and "inside". There is subject, verb, metaphor, a certain way of constructing a phrase so as to give it rhythm – these are the laws that are imposed on you. On the one hand, language is something which tortures me, doesn't give me peace, forces me to rack my brains until I can't do it any longer; and on the other hand, when I do this, it actually helps me. It is an inexplicable vicious circle.

A daily blog makes you focus more. I’ve made the point several times that the absence of newspapers cluttering the house and (for the most part) of television over the past 20 years has been a great boon for me. It has created the quiet and space for reflection. And the requirement to put a thought or two in writing on the blog makes me think more clearly.
A second benefit is archival – I can retrieve thoughts and references so easily. I just have to punch a key word into the search engine on the blog and I retrieve everything.
But there’s the rub! That you have to use the search engine – and be confident that you know the correct word to punch. I haven’t been using the “label” feature properly in my blogs. I’ve gone over some of them and then created a cloud label, as you will have noticed, which I find has interesting results.

I have perhaps reached the point of needing to put the more worthwhile blogs in a book format? I suspect that most readers are like me – and are more drawn to text which is personal rather than abstract.
But published autobiographies are, by definition, by famous people – and highly suspect for that very reason. Eric Hobsbawn’s was deeply disappointing. The various books published by Arthur Koestler were vastly more satisfying.

Biographies, although more objective, are also about famous people; focus on their achievements; and rarely, for me, give insights into the doubts, confusions and uncertainties ordinary people have.

I know, on the other hand, of only three highly personal life accounts from un-famous people – and they all made a big impact on me. First a fairly short series of snapshots of a political activist’s life . Then a deeply moving book written by a Scottish writer and poet in the weeks before he carried out his planned suicide. Finally a much longer (875 pages !) and more rigorous set of musings from an ex-academic

And few books do proper justice to the aesthetics of publishing - whether font, format, spacing, diagrams, pictures and poems. There, then, is a possible project for the future?

One of the appropriate pieces BBC's Through the Night programmes offered me as I was writing this was Shostakovitch's chamber symphony 110

The East-West schism

2012-01-07T13:50:00.003+02:00

Some strange scenes on television yesterday - believers singing and dancing in the river Tundzha, as they celebrate Epiphany day in the town of Kalofer, Bulgaria. Inspired by the music of a folk orchestra and by homemade plum brandy, they danced a slow “mazhko horo,” or men’s dance, stomping on the rocky riverbed. Led by the town’s mayor, a bass drummer and several bagpipers, the men danced for nearly an hour, up to their waists in the cold water, pushing away chunks of ice floating on the river.Traditionally, an Eastern Orthodox priest throws a cross in the river and it is believed that the one who retrieves it will be freed from evil spirits that might have troubled him. Across Bulgaria, young men also jumped into rivers and lakes to recover crucifixes cast by priests in an old ritual marking the feast of Epiphany and the baptism by John the Baptist of Jesus Christ when the latter was 30 years old.

The great It’s about Time painting blog gives us some historical and aesthetic background on how the schism between the Eastern and Western parts of Christianity have affected the celebrations at this time of year -

in Western Christianity, the arrival of the Magi at the site of Jesus' birth is called the Feast of the Epiphany, celebrated on January 6. The Orthodox Church commemorates the Adoration of the Magi on the Feast of the Nativity on December 25 – and January 6th apparently marks the baptism by John the Baptist of Christ when the latter was 30 years old.
Western paintings of the Journey and the Adoration of the Magi usually depict 3 Magi, represented as kings, travelling to find the newborn Jesus in a stable by following a star; laying before him gifts of gold, frankincense, & myrrh; & lingering to worship him. Christian iconography has considerably expanded the simple biblical account of the Magi given in Matthew (2:1-11). The early church used the story to emphasize the point that Jesus was recognized, from his earliest infancy, as king of the earth and therefore showed the Magi with eastern garb.

The Its about Time blog shows how the early renaissance versions showed the garb of the Magi with Eastern traces - which vanished in the later versions. An early example of people being whitewashed out of history.

From the summer, I've been referring to the disturbing events taking place in Hungary. They are well summarised in the EuroTribune website and in this Eurozine piece.
Eurozine is a network of European cultural magazines - sometimes a bit pretentious but always with a distinctive voice. The latest issue has a series of articles on the European crisis and also an article which promised to be an overdue critique of the role which EU Structural Funds have played in developing and sustaining the clientilism and corruption of souther europe but which, sadly deteriorated into a rather incoherent, if still interesting, perspective on modern Greece.

aesthetic pleasures

2012-01-03T16:09:00.005+02:00

This blog is a celebration of good writing and living – and the town of Sofia (nestling in the Balkans) and the village of Sirnea (nestling in the Carpathians) take central place in that celebration. Each has its own incredible beauty – for the most part ignored and undervalued by those who live there but so much appreciated by nomads like me. In the last days of 2011, we had the pleasure of discovering yet more Old Masters’ paintings in The recently re-opened Bulgary gallery – associated with the Bulgary restaurant www.restaurant.bulgary.bg - which has lovingly recreating the ambiance of old Bulgaria. Two of the paintings I had admired in the last Viktoria Gallery auction – Dmitrov Nikola’s 'River' (1955) and Olga Shishokova’s 'Coffee in Karlovo' (1940) were there (as well as most of the Trtitchovs) and were suitably negotiated into my collection. The Shishkova heads todays’ post and Dmitrov’s below.

Today’s wanderings unearthed a small, new gallery on Sulunska St with old masters such as Boris Mitov and Stanio Stomatev.

And also a glorious book celebrating, in poetic black and white pictures, the beauty which can be found adorning the older Sofia buildings – if only you look behind the peeling walls and high enough ! It’s called 'Sofia Enigma-Stigma' by Milchev and is available (in Bulgarian and English text) from http://www.enthusiast.bg/ for only 7 euros.

The loneliness of the long-distance runner

2012-01-02T16:13:00.003+02:00

I have been, almost literally, struck dumb these last few weeks of 2011 as I have contemplated the intellectual and ethical poverty of our ruling clasess. One financial blog’s reflections on the year and what the future holds caught my mood perfectly

1. Wall Street dropped some of its pretence to fairness and softer forms of fraud and resorted to overt theft as MF Global stole significant sums of money, bonds, and bullion assets directly from customer accounts, under the eyes of the regulators, and transferred the money to its global bankers who refused to give it back.
Trend: Theft by the financiers will continue and intensify. The victims will be vilified to blunt public reaction.

2. The Eurozone came under unremitting assault by the ratings agencies and their associated banks and hedge funds. The Euro is an inherently 'difficult' currency to manage and has always been more susceptible to broad swings in value. This is because it is an economic union without a comprehensive political and financial union. It more closely resembles the original thirteen states of the US under the Articles of Confederation than it does a comprehensive Republic.
Trend: The Eurozone will continue to struggle to find a balance between political and financial factors, and will evolve into a stronger union of fewer members. Germany and France will continue to emerge as the great Western European power. The UK will be preoccupied by its own set of severe internal problems and regional unrest as austerity bites deeply. The UK will begin to act as more of an Anglo-American agent in the Eurozone. It may take on more of the character of an Orwellian state.

Some people might (and do very persuasively) argue that it is time for a new hegemony. It would be nice, certainly, for more respect to be shown to Scandinavian values. Even the heavy-handed Catholic church has managed to sustain its critical attitude to greed and, over the decades, seems to have pursued a much more positive attitude to community enterprise. The success of the Mondragon model of cooperative industrial activity is one which deserves much wider celebration – although it does worry me that I cannot find a proper treatment in the English language of the story of how this small venture by a catholic priest in the 1940s in a remote Spanish village led to such a commercial success (giving now employment to 30,000 and weathering, so far, all economic storms). There are, however, vidoes on its inspiring story here; here; here; and here. Think Ronnie Lessem’s Managing in four worlds. However strong my affections are for such models, my own feeling is that the better approach is that of the sceptic, agnostic or, indeed, anarchist – ie a “plague on all your houses”.

This is a time of year for thinking about one's life and making resolutions. A few years ago, I discovered a list of 40 tips for living a more balanced life. I've reduced it to 30 tips

A friend has noticed some of the references I've made in this blog to the benefits of rural life for us over-connected zombies - and sent me a recent Pico Iyer article on the joys of solitude

We have more and more ways to communicate but less and less to say. Partly because we’re so busy communicating. And so rushing to meet so many deadlines that we hardly register that what we need most are lifelines.

And a blogpost from an ex-banker has made the same point.

I've been trying to read over my blogposts of the past year (all 250 plus of them) - and feel that I have been too much of the gadfly. Skating lightly over profound issues. My feeling is that I should return in the posts to come to the issues they raise - read more closely the large number of links I've given - and offer rather deepr thoughts........

Reverse technology transfer

2011-12-26T10:59:00.002+02:00

Brits of my generation are proud of the BBC and its reputation. The political and economic hits, however, it has taken from successive recent governments means that if now lags behind the quality programmes I can access here from French and German stations. TV5 is our default programme - with the MEZZO music programme not far behind. With some anticipation, we have been waiting for Jérusalem, la ville des deux paix to start - "un Voyage magique et hors du temps, des musiques soufies aux lamentations hébraïques". It has now got underway – under the direction of Jordi Savall with Armenian, Israaeli, Palestine and Morrocan players on such instruments as the kamancha, oud, schofar, santur, morisca and qanun. You can see and hear an excerpt here. I find such sharing of music from different religious cultures much more appropriate for this time of the year than the Christian stuff we are exposed to.

One of our leading development experts has posed an interesting question on his blog - what can development thinking and experience contribute to the solution of Europe’s present crises?

Reading about Greece or Italy or Spain or Ireland today reminds me strongly of reading about and working in African countries in the mid-1980s - similarly crippled by debt crises, and similarly subject to external monitoring and interference. Rigorous monetarist discipline not only stopped growth in its tracks, but also undermined human welfare and, in many cases, destroyed the social contract. Progressive economists in the 1980s coalesced around the idea of Adjustment With a Human Face - accepting the need for macro-economic stabilisation and structural reform, but also insisting on the need to protect the welfare of the poorest and the provision of basic social services. Arguably, the re-evaluation of structural adjustment underpinned both UNDP's work on human development, launched in the Human Development Report of 1990, and the World Bank's re-discovery of poverty, in the World Development Report of 1990. In turn, these contributed to poverty-focused debt relief initiatives in the 1990s, and to the adoption of the Millennium Development Goals.
I don't work on domestic European policy, but it does seem to me that there are some lessons here, at least some general principles. Structural adjustment is a necessary process but has a high human cost. Poor people need to be supported as consumers, but also as producers. A high level of participation is required, to underpin ownership and legitimacy. The international community has to cohere around high-level human development goals. And financing is key, including if appropriate in the form of debt relief. There is, it goes without saying, a great deal of international analysis of how to manage the fall-out from the 2008 financial crisis, making similar points. I've written about this elsewhere, originally for the Commonwealth Secretariat.
On financing, I can't resist making a point which is not exactly taken from development studies, but which draws on my very limited reading in the area of currency unions and fiscal transfers - namely that they don't often work unless there are substantial transfers between regions or jurisdictions, to manage asymmetric shocks, but also to redistribute between rich and poor regions. The German constitution, for example, guarantees equal standards of service provision between the various Lander - and allocates tax revenue accordingly. The euro-zone has no such ambition, or rule.
The OECD also has an interesting paper on fiscal equalisation, reviewing the experience of countries as varied as Australia, Canada and Germany. On average, these countries assign 2% of GNP to transfers, to manage asymmetric shocks and redistribute from rich to poor.
The GDP of the euro area is currently about 9 trn euros, so 2% would amount to about 180 bn euros. By contrast, current stuctural funds amount to about 30bn euros, some of which goes to the poorest regions in the poorest countries, but some of which goes to poor regions in richer countries. Further, structural funds support production, not consumption. Thus, the gap between what is needed and available is at least 150 bn euros per year.
Does it not follow that attempts to save the euro need to focus not just on the need for fiscal discipline and structural reform (= structural adjustment), but also on the essential role of large-scale transfers? An extra 150bn euros a year is not trivial in the context of an EU budget of some 140 bn euro, but that is only because the EU budget is so small in relation to EU GDP (capped at 1%) and to Government spending. Tax-payers in richer euro countries, please take note.

This is an interesting point - but the new member states have difficulty enough absorbing the Structural Funds they have been allocated - and the existence and scale of these funds (relative to those, for example, of the mainline Bulgarian and Romanian budgets) has arguably made an important contribution to the systemic corruption which is endemic in these countries' political and administrative elites. And the basic question is a useful reminder of the need for more European humility......

Finally, an interesting new website for me - the Bureau for Investigative Journalism which tries to resurrect that tradition from within a teaching institute.

Fossils and patting sticks

2011-12-26T05:31:00.007+02:00

I spent two Xmases working in Baku, Azerbaijan – and very much appreciated the absence of the shopping fever and pressures which characterise these days in the West. Even His Holiness the Pope is apparently lamenting in his Christmas homilythat Christmas has become an increasingly commercial celebration.

But Sofia must be one of the best places to be to avoid the crassness of Xmas. True, the walking St (Vitosha) has overhead decorations – but they are modest and hardly noticed.
Otherwise (if you avoid the malls which have opened only in the past few years) things are almost normal.

And some imagination is used to offer special attractions eg a large fossil market was open last week in the Museum of Natural History which offered marvellous shapes, sizes and textures at very cheap prices - eg this very aesthetic sea hedghog fossil which doubles as a paper weight.

Saturday we wanted to buy a "sooroovachka" – a stick decorated with embroidery, dried fruit, coins etc which kids in this part of the world use for patting family, friends and visitors (in Romania its'called "sorkova") whilst saying a wish for health, wealth and happiness to the one patted.

Bulgarians and Romanians give the child money at the end of the patting which they believe is their way of buying success for the coming year. The women’s market – the collection of open air stalls between Bvds Hristo Botev and Elizabeth – was the place to find it. Most of the products are local fruit and vegetables – with the spice stalls being my favourites. Such an incredible variety of spices and medicinal teas!
I realise that I haven’t posted any video links of Bulgaria yet on the site – here’s a good one to start with.

the charm, yet again, of Sofia!

2011-12-24T13:24:00.009+02:00

After 4 years of familiarity with Sofia (almost 3 years in residence) it is typical that I stumbled yesterday on a well-established (and prestigious) gallery focussing on Bulgaria’s old masters - hidden away in a charming and old part of Sofia between Prague Bvd and Bvds Makedonia/Totleben. It’s the Tzennotsi Gallery and has the richest collection (in more senses than one) of all the galleries I have visited here.
The picture above is a Russi Genchev which the gallery would not deign to keep. This Boris Denev which adorns its spacious display walls is a more appropriate exemple of its exhibits.

And, like, the current exhibition at the City Gallery, there were so many painters of whom I hadn’t heard. Some of the paintings seem to have been there for several years (eg some Vladimir Dmitrov’s at 20,000 euros in the 2009 Antiques Price Guide) – which makes one wonder about their business model. Clearly they cater for bigger spenders than me! Probably an institutional market ie the banks! Talking of which, one of the nice features of many hotels here in Bulgaria is their display of (in many cases local) paintings.

In the same street as the Gallery (Buzludja) we also found an enticing little Weinstube (Vestibule Wine Ambassador) which turns out also to be a producer and seller of "bourgeois" furniture. Definitely worth a visit – both in winter for its cosy, traditional interior and in the summer for its garden area at the back. Also in the same street a patisserie with a great range of its own products - including a large apple and walnut cake round for 5 euros!

And we also had an interesting encounter in Tsar Samuel with the sinister Masons. One of the many tiny shops in the area between Hristov Botev and Vitosha with the products of imaginatively-crafted dresses, shawls etc enticed us in and to the purchase of an embroidered cardigan. We were so pleased we readily accepted several small calendar cards which marketed its 50-or so year-old artisan – only to discover when I accessed the website that it had very strong masonic connections. I was so horrified I contemplated returning the cardigan – since, in Scotland, the Masons are a highly divisive force – in the 1970s with a strong and corrupt presence in the police forces. And I remember my (highly tolerant) father – a Scottish Presbyterean Minister – railing against their influence amongst his “Elders”. But, in this part of the world where there was so much repression, perhaps they played a different role? They were certainly outlawed by the fascist forces here in the early 1940s and its members persecuted under the communists. Sadly the intrinsic secrecy of the organisation makes that difficult to check out properly . Their apologists are full of good-sounding rhetoric about freedom and democracy but I cannot take seriously anyone who associates with their silly tribal initiation rituals with trousers at half-mast and quasi-religious artefacts.

Fear the Greeks

2011-12-23T13:38:00.001+02:00

Many of us wondered how on earth Greece managed to gain entry to the EU - let alone the euro. And many of us missed a blistering report issued by the OECD in August which blasted the Greek bureaucracy. Going by the rather bland title Greece: Review of the Central Administration, the 127-page report can be quickly summed up: The government apparatus in Athens is virtually unable to implement reform."It is not clear how existing and new entities of (the government) will work together in order to secure the leadership needed for reform, including the necessary strategic vision, accountability, strategic planning, policy coherence and collective commitment, and communication," reads the damning report to which my attention was drawn only today by the marvellous Der Spiegel when it reported on the initial phase of the work of the European technocrats headed by a German who descended recently on the capital.
"For the first time, we wanted to show -- systematically and with proof -- what isn't working at the administration level and what is preventing Greece from making progress on structural reforms," Caroline Varley, OECD senior policy analyst and co-author of the report, told the German daily Die Welt. "So far, Greece's central governmental apparatus has neither the capacity nor the ability to undertake large reforms."
The report was commissioned by the Greek Ministry of Administrative Reform and E-Governance and provides a detailed examination of the state of central administration in the government. It focuses on efficiency and effectiveness as Athens struggles to introduce necessary reforms. It found that communication among the country's 14 ministries was appallingly paltry. Furthermore, the huge number of departments within ministries -- many of them consisting solely of a department head and others with just one or two subordinates -- results in widespread inefficiency and lack of oversight.
"Administrative work is fragmented and compartmentalized within ministries," the report writes. "Ministries are not able to prioritize ... and are handicapped by coordination problems. In cases where coordination does happen, it is ad hoc, based on personal initiative and knowledge, and not supported by structures." Were such coordination even to take place, the report indicates that administrators do not have access to the necessary data, nor does such data exist in many cases. "The administration does not have the habit of keeping records or the ability to extract information from data (where available), nor generally of managing organizational knowledge," the report found. The problems found in Greece's central administration, says the OECD, are the result of decades of clientelism and the sheer volume of the laws and regulations that govern competencies within the ministries. The report found 17,000 such laws, decrees and edicts.
How, then, should Greece solve the problem? The OECD proposes a "big bang approach" -- meaning a massive administrative restructuring. And, co-author Varley says, it needs to happen quickly. "Greece has only a small window of time to change and reform itself," she told Die Welt. "And it is getting smaller."
A year ago, I was lamenting the lack of social democratic vision.

C'est la Vie - et La Mort

2011-12-23T12:36:00.001+02:00

In the summer I predicted that a bid with which I was involved for a Structural Fund project would be judged as failing to meet the admin requirements – since this is the easiest way for evaluation panels to get rid of unwanted competition in the EC’s procurement system. A few weeks ago I had that prediction confirmed – but with a bonus. None of the 8 or so companies which bid for the project satisfied the onerous and bureaucratic administrative requirements! Little wonder that new member countries find it so difficult to spend the money which has been allocated to them!
Also in the summer I was told, at the start of the tendering process (!), who would emerge as the winner of a significant 4 year EC project in a large country with oil (and temperature extremes). And hey presto – that French company has duly emerged the victor. With at least two of its 3 key experts having no real experience in the required field but the Team Leader having spent time there and having all the tight contacts (let alone nationality) to grease the necessary parts of the machinery. I had decided at the start that the project (and capital) were not for me – and turned down several approaches. We were all wasting our time. The process was a foregone conclusion.

As I watch the images (on French television) from Vaclav Havel's funeral in Prague, it is fitting to give yet another quotation - this time from a 2002 address in which he was musing on his time in power -

And I’ve discovered an astonishing thing: although it might be expected that this wealth of experience would have given me more and more self-assurance, confidence, and polish, the exact opposite is true. In that time, I have become a good deal less sure of myself, a good deal more humble. You may not believe this, but every day I suffer more and more from stage fright; every day, I am more afraid that I won’t be up to the job, or that I’ll make a hash of it. It’s harder and harder for me to write my speeches, and when I do write them, I am more fearful than ever that I will hopelessly repeat myself, over and over again. More and more often, I am afraid that I will fall woefully short of expectations, that I will somehow reveal my own lack of qualifications for the job, that despite my good faith I will make ever greater mistakes, that I will cease to be trustworthy and therefore lose the right to do what I do.
And while other presidents, younger than me in terms of their time in office, delight in every opportunity to meet each other, or with other important people, to appear on television or deliver a speech, all of this simply makes me more fearful. At times, the very thing I should be welcoming as a great opportunity I deliberately try to avoid in the almost irrational fear that I will, in one way or another, squander the opportunity and perhaps even harm a good cause. In short, I seem more and more dubious, even to myself. And the more enemies I have, the more I side with them in my own mind, and so I become my own worst enemy

Repressed Art

2011-12-20T09:29:00.004+02:00

A decade or so ago, I was on a 3 year project in Uzbekistan and saw a temporary exhibition of stunning paintings in one of Tashkent’s few public galleries. I was not then in collection mode but was sufficiently impressed to photograph some of them – sadly without noting the names of the painters. Yesterday I was googling “socialist realism” and stumbled across an amazing story of artistic gems hidden in the (western) Karakalpak region of Uzbekistan. One man, Igor Savitsky, saved a treasure trove of Russian and Uzbek art by “hiding” it in a museum in Nukus near the infamous Aral Sea -

A tireless collector of paintings that the Soviet government wanted destroyed, Savitsky traveled thousands of miles in the post-war period scheming, plotting, pleading, doing whatever it took to get his hands on the art he so passionately wanted to preserve.
A frustrated artist, Savitsky was working as an archaeologist when he became fascinated by the indigenous cultures of Western Uzbekistan. He began to collect jewelry, coins, handmade clothing, and other items in danger of being lost as the Soviets sought to devalue distinctively ethnic artifacts. Savitsky even succeeded in convincing government officials to provide funding for a museum in Nukus, far from Moscow’s prying eyes. But then Savitsky discovered his true calling. Pretending to buy state-approved art, he daringly rescued thousands of works by artists banned during the Stalin era for speaking out against authority, for being gay, or for simply refusing to paint in the style they were told. Risking torture, imprisonment, and death, this small group remained true to their artistic vision. Savitsky even managed to cajole the cash to pay for the art from the same authorities who had banned it.
Savitsky’s greatest discovery was an unknown school of artists who settled in Uzbekistan after the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. There they encountered an Islamic culture as exotic to them as Tahiti was for Gauguin, and they developed a startlingly original style that fused European modernism with centuries-old Eastern traditions.

It all came to wider light apparently in 1998 when the New York Times published this article.
And all of this was celebrated in a special film earlier this year. Desert of Forbidden Art uses this story of Savitsky and the artists by juxtaposing images from the collection with rare Soviet archival film and stills. Ben Kingsley, Sally Field, and Ed Asner voice the diaries and letters of Savitsky and the artists and bring to life a dramatic journey of sacrifice for the sake of creative freedom.

But late last year Uzbek officials abruptly gave the Nukus Museum 48 hours to evacuate one of its two exhibition buildings, so staff members ended up stacking hundreds of fragile canvases and paper works on the floor of the other space. The building has since stood empty, its fate unknown, and more than 2,000 works are no longer on view at the museum. The museum’s director, Marinika M. Babanazarova, who has fiercely guarded the collection for 27 years since Savitsky’s death in 1984, was not permitted to travel to the United States for a trip that was to include a screening of the documentary at the National Gallery of Art in Washington.
And over the last year Ms. Babanazarova’s staff members have undergone 15 government audits, in which they have repeatedly been asked to explain their travels overseas and the nature of their contacts with foreigners, she said.
The irony is that the art Savitsky saved — beginning with traditional Uzbek folk art and textiles and blossoming to comprise art by ethnic Russian avant-garde artists — was at the time under fire for not being Soviet enough. Now it seems, 20 years after Uzbekistan won its independence — it is being targeted by the new regime for not being Uzbek enough.

Issues; there are several lessons from this story which, hopefully, I will pursue in future posts. First and foremost - what an exceptional, courageous individual can achieve. This is an issue which has cropped up several times in this blog eg an American who did heroic things during the Smyrna massacres of 1923; a Greek and a Turk who had in the preceding decade or so tried to stem the tide of ethnic hatred; Havel; the good German of Nanjing in the early 1940s.
And, second, the way artists have had to adjust to repressive regimes. I realised only recently just how much the Bulgarian art I admire, for eaxmple, must have been affected by that. A few migrated; many opted for design work in the cinema and theatre; a few courageous ones like Boris Denev refused to compromise and were banned from painting.

Gloom and doom

2011-12-19T16:50:00.010+02:00

I don’t often refer to the deaths of public figures in this blog. But some critical comments about Vaclav Havel in this discussion thread – did inspire me to make my own contribution - "Of course there are, for those with a radical turn of mind, blemishes on Havel’s record – such as his support for the Iraq war and for NATO. But why do we expect perfection from those who are suddenly elevated to such positions of leadership – particularly when that position was so bereft of real powers? Looked at any way, the man was a tower of moral strength and courage – as can be seen by the uncompromising way he addressed the Czech politicians in 1997. In November 1997, the Czech government, led by Prime Minister Václav Klaus, was forced to resign in the wake of allegations that, among other things, the Civic Democratic Party, led by Klaus, had access to a slush fund held in an unauthorized Swiss bank account. In the period between those resignations and the appointment of an interim government, President Havel, who had recently been released from hospital and was recuperating from pneumonia, delivered what is, in effect, a state of the union speech to the Parliament and Senate of the Czech Republic -

It seems to me that our main fault was vanity. We behaved like arrogant students at the top of their class or spoiled only children who feel superior to others and think they have the right to tell others what to do. …We were hypnotized by our own macroeconomic indicators, heedless of the fact that sooner or later these indicators would also reveal what lay beyond the horizon of the economic or technocratic world view: that there are factors whose weight or significance no accountant can calculate, but which nevertheless create the only thinkable environment for any economic development—I mean the rules of the game, the rule of law, the moral order from which every system of governance derives and without which it cannot function, a climate of social concord.
The declared ideal of success and profit was defiled because we permitted a state of affairs in which the most immoral became the most successful and the greatest profits were made by thieves who stole with impunity. Under the cloak of an unqualified liberalism, which regarded any kind of economic controls or regulations as left-wing aberrations….. morality, decency, humility before the order of nature, solidarity, concern for future generations, respect for the law, the culture of interpersonal relationships—all these and many similar things were trivialised as "superstructure," as icing on the cake, until at last we realised that there was nothing left to put the icing on: the forces of economic production themselves had been undermined. They were undermined because—with apologies to the atheists among you—they were not cultivated in the strict spirit of the divine commandments. Drunk with power and success, and spellbound by what a wonderful career move a political party was, many began—in an environment that made light of the law—to turn a blind eye to one thing and another, until at last they were confronted with scandals that brought into question one of our greatest reason for pride—the privatisation process.

You can read the entire address at pages 39-47 of a paper on my website. And another (earlier) powerful address he made in 1995 about more global issues to an American audience) can be found here.
At a time when our politicians are so puny, I find it difficult to understand why there are so many people incapable of recognising courage and honesty when it is staring them in the face - particularly on the person's death? We are, indeed, pathetic and ungenerous individuals.

John Keane’s Vaclav Havel – a political tragedy in six acts (2000) was one attempt to put the man in historical context (by a prominent british political scientist) - although at least one highly critical review felt the large and well-documented book was rather light in its intellectual (particularly Czech) foundations. For example, there is apparently no mention of the great Thomas Masaryk, in 1919 the first Czechoslovak President, in Keane's book. The review is so savage that its rejoinder from the author is only appropriate. The renowned sociologist Ernest Gellner - who spent the last five years of his life teaching at the Central European University in Prague - supplied, as possibly his last paper, the comparison of the 2 intellectual Presidents and their times.

At the end of November I confessed to some “ennui” – the pall had gone off reading and blogging. Particularly relating to my professional interests. Was it the lack of wine? I have been pretty disciplined in the past month in resisting the blandishments of the tasty Bulgarian whites. But that has been more than compensated for by the tastiness of the vegetarian dishes I have been creating – eg this morning a very succulent grated beetroot, apple and carrot dish – seasoned with small dabs of olive oil, apple vinegar and salt. Probably it is just the combination of end-of-year blues and the general sense of gloom which pervades much of the (European) world. An article today on this has a quote from the political philospher John Gray which captures things very well-

We've moved from the delusional optimism of the 1990s to a sense of intractable difficulties: resource scarcity and enormous debts; the erosion of bourgeois life; the inability of politicians to solve big problems; the realisation that the economic problems of the 70s weren't really solved; the realisation that the window for doing something about climate change – the next five years – will be entirely occupied with trying to restart economic growth.
Meanwhile, for westerners who instinctively look to other countries or big political ideas for inspiration, the possibilities seem to be withering. The US appears economically declining and politically dysfunctional. The EU is damaged and possibly disintegrating. The social democracy of Europe's postwar golden decades seems unable to modernise itself.

It's politics, stupid

2011-12-17T11:40:00.002+02:00

My mother lived to the grand old age of 101 – and was still pottering around her small flat in the supported accomodation in which she lived for almost a decade in her 90s, doing her own shopping and cooking meals for me on my visits from far-flung places. She had some difficulty understanding what it was I was doing in the countries of central europe and central asia which had, for so much of her lifetime, behind "The Iron Curtain". And it was not easy to explain – she was, after all, of that generation which actually produced things; the more effete characters who provided services in those days such as teachers, acountants, bankers, doctors had status precisely because they were in such a small minority. Since then the number of what Robert Reich called in the 90s "symbolic analysts” who do little more than manipulate words and figures has grown to scandalous proportions. Little wonder that we are all so confused!
But I have just come across a new paper which gives a clear overview of the difficulties people doing my sort of work in transition countries over the past 2 decades face; and which also captures the critique I have been conducting of it in varoius papers. It’s written by Tom Carrothers for the Carnegie Foundation and is entitled Aiding governance in developing countries – progress despite uncertainties. He has eight injunctions –
• recognise that governance deficiencies are primarily political
• give attention to the demand for governance, not just the supply
• go local
• strive for best fit – rather than best practice
• take informal institutions into account
• mainstream governance (ie don't just run it as an add-on)
• don’t ignore the international dimensions
• reform thyself

Its references pointed me to a useful summary which DfiD did recently of the findings from 10 years of funded research on governance and fragile states 2001-2010 - The Politics of poverty - elites, citizens and states
A year ago, I was working on a sceptic's glossary of administrative and political terms which really deserves wider currency

Sofia City Gallery scores again!

2011-12-14T11:40:00.002+02:00

The Sofia City Art Gallery has put together another excellent exhibition – this time to honour the memory of the Bulgarian Association of New Artists which was active from 1931 to after 1944. Founded in Sofia, its objective was to unite artists with similar aesthetic viewpoints who espoused new trends in art in keeping with movements in western Europe in the 1920s and 1930s. Although its first members worked primarily in a realistic manner, around 1936—when membership had grown to 55—other Bulgarian artists who had studied and worked in Paris, Munich and Vienna joined its ranks. Artists such as Alexandar Zhendov, BENCHO OBRESHKOV, Boris Eliseev, Vera Nedkova, David Perets, Eliezer Alshekh, IVAN NENOV, Kiril Petrov and KIRIL TSONEV contributed more modernist approaches, rejecting academic art, folkloric elements and especially the ideas of Social Realism put into practice by the founders of the Society. An internet review said its members created works with a „sophisticated approach to style, a purity of form and a stable internal structure”. But this sort of jargon doesn’t tell me anything – and I have to say that, much as I appreciate this insight into the historical developments of Bulgarian painting and the imaginative way the City Gallery has dealt with it (with blow-ups of the agonised press receptions of the time addorning the gallery’s pillars), this is not a genre which particularly appeals to me. But I was deeply impressed with the graphics of Vesselin Staikov and the work of Ivan Penkov and Bronka Gyurova. After 1944 the New Artists’ Society was absorbed by the Union of Bulgarian Artists . Many of those who had been members of the Society were declared ‘bourgeois artists’ by the Communist regime and were no longer able to take part in exhibitions; several, including Alshekh, Elisev and Perets, emigrated.
The frequency of these special exhibitions at the City Gallery (which always borrow works from the country’s regional galleries) contrasts so favourably with the lack of imagination shown by the National Gallery just across the road which never changes its permanent exhibition and rarely puts on worthwhile specials (I do remember a great tanev exhibition they mounted a year or so ago. The National Gallery charges about 5 euros – and the City Gallery is free. Therein lies a lessons about the better service generally offered by local government!
The graphic is one of Vesselin Staikov's at the exhibition. In addition to engravings with themes from nature, old towns and mountain villages, Staikov produced a cycle of engravings on the modern city: Sofia with its modern architecture, the clearing of rubble after the air-raids and the construction of new houses and buildings. The artist is also fond of doing ancient, strangely shaped trees. Labour themes occupy an important place in Staikov’s work. He shows love and understanding for the worker, the peasant. Some engravings reflect the romanticism of Bulgarian scenery and architecture, others – the primitive force and ruggedness of the village landscape. .

Britain and Europe

2011-12-11T17:55:00.009+02:00

A year ago, my blog rose to a challenge to name the 50 books to keep in one’s library if forced to reduce it to 50 books My basic criteria were (a) the light thrown on the European dilemmas of the last century and (b) the quality of the language and the book as a whole. There’s nothing I would really want to change in the entry. I did, however, leave 6 vacant places – and should now consider if any of the books I have read in 2011 might be added to the list.
And the 10th December post of last year celebrated, on my dad’s birth day, some of the values of his generation which are, today, sorely missed.

The British veto at last week’s EU summit is shocking both for what it represents - the protection of financial sector interests by a political cabinet whose members are funded by these financial parasites; and for the marginalisation it augurs for the country. The Guardian has a useful overview which makes the point that this is the culmination of both daft recent political decisions (such as the Conservative withdrawal a couple of years ago from the European People’s Party, the umbrella group in the European Parliament for the parties which dominate so many European governments these days) and the incomprehending and hostile attitude of so many of the old British political class to Europeans. A friend sent me recently Thomas Kremer’s 2005 book The Missing Heart of Europe which explains much of this mutual incomprehension -

The engineers of the EU are deaf to the rising clamour of national identities as they are blind to the profound continent’s diversity of economic and political cultures. within the continent. Therein lies the breathtaking arrogance of their profession. The fatal assumption all along has been that member states are similar, and that national national diversity does not matter and can be over-ridden by negotiations in a closed political circle. within the confines of a narrow bureaucratic and political circle. But it is precisely this diversity that determines just how far, how fast and how deep European European integration can be.is possible.
Europe’s faultline does not lie in the middle of the English Channel. Across the continent it separates those countries with an eccentric heritage, where power emanates from the grass roots and authority is vested in the individual, from those with a concentric tradition, where power is centralised and the corporate state predominates. The confrontation between France and Britain is not about €3bn ($3.7bn), or integration, or the visceral dislike of two leaders or about reigniting historical rivalries. It is more profound than that.
What makes Britain eccentric is the organic development of its parliamentary democracy; its trade-based maritime expansion; a rich, flexible , multi-rooted and near grammar-less language; a pragmatic approach to life and philosophy; the common law; an anti-authoritarian spirit; an all-pervasive and irreverent humour; an unwritten , rolling constitution; reliance on individual initiative; commercial enterprise and an attitude of easygoing carelessness.
What makes France concentric is almost the exact opposite. It moved from a successful absolutist rule to an uneasy democracy by episodic revolutions; it achieved its pre-eminence through a land mass expansion; the grammar of its language is sophisticated with a vocabulary jealously guarded by an august academic body; its philosophy is steeped in great ideals with logic preferred to common sense; its monarchies, empires and republics are distinguished by a rich tapestry of often rewritten constitutions; it draws heavily on formal, written procedures inherent in Roman law rather than live evidence and courtroom drama; its people defernaturally, if with some resentment, to the authority of the state; a n economic reliance on state-supported enterprises and a fine-honed bureaucracy that governs life through manifold regulations that its citizens have learnt to circumvent.
In critical respects the Nordic countries, the Netherlands, the Czech Republic and along with Britain are eccentric while Germany, Spain and together with France form the concentric core of the continent.

During the 80s I had a lot of experience of working with European colleagues – in at the founding of the French-led Organisation for Traditional Industrial Regions (RETI), for example, and a member of Dutch and Italian led- networks which produced reports on the experience of urban participation and innovation in Europe. I was also one of the British representatives on the Council of Europe’s Standing Conference of Local and Regional Authorities for some 4 years. Even with my French and German languages, I would get pretty impatient with the posturing and rhetoric of my continental colleagues! But this was one of the things we contributed to Europe - puncturing the hot air of the overpaid Eurocrats and federalists. Critical as I am of the New Labour Governments, its Ministers made a positive contribution to European developments and earned respect. But the upper class twits who now form the Conservative political class have barely altered their attitude to foreigners in 100 years - and are sadly supported by many nationalistic working class English whose tribal emotions have been touched by the immigration of the past 4 decades. Cameron and his team have been steadily alienating European leaders with their comments and behaviour - and this was probably the personal pay-off.
Having said all that, however, some of the reactions to Cameron's veto are probably a bit extreme. And this article - 10 myths about Cameron's EU Veto - is an important challenge to the Guardian newspaper line. But probably the most continuously insightful blog on the UK position in all these negotiations is the Bagehot one in The Economist journal. However, the best single comment is probably this blogger with diplomatic experience.

Most of my working experience in the past 20 years has been with Dutch or German-led consortia. I got on well with the former - although the German bureaucracy did get to me! However, my worst (sourest and most pedantic)boss was an English woman lawyer who headed the TAIEX office in the 90s which arranged trips for technocrats in EU and aspiring countries in the pursuit of theie future compliance with EU regulations. That office also gave me a real insight into the operation of European civil servants - who devoted their enrgies to in-fighting(the real work was done by those on short-term contracts); and left the office early - secure in the knowledge that they couldn't be sacked.

Britain has been in steady decline all my adult life. The 60s were the years of diagnosis; the 70s of experimentation – with 1979 as a landmark when even the Labour government lost its faith in Keynesianism. The next 3 decades of Thatcherism and Bliarism seemed to many at the time to be giving Britain a new lease of life – but is belatedly being recognised as a disastrous abandonment of its basic industries and encouragement of unsustainable private debt. With the North Sea oil running out and no further benefits to be accrued by the state from privatisations, the future is bleak for the country. It is appropriate to ask how Japan coped with the melt-down it faced almost 20 years ago – and what lessons that experience contains for the UK.
Richard Koo has for some time been trying to get us to look at what that Japanese experience can tell us about the current addiction to deflation and austerityhere; here and here.
Also a video

Sofia was looking like this a few days ago. Its another new acquisition - an Ivan Petrov from the 1960s

Rethinking local services

2011-12-07T16:11:00.007+02:00

For someone who dedicated 22 years of his life to local government - in senior political positions in local government and running, in parallel in academia, a Local Government Unit which ran workshops and published papers about issues about local government management, I write very little now about the subject. True, there are some papers on my website - about the lessons I drew from social inclusion work which took up a lot of my time and commitment between 1970 and 1990 ; about the experience of European local government in transferring functions; and a Roadmap which
I enjoyed writing in 2003-05 for those running the Kyrgyzstan system.

I have, however, watched with despair as the british system has become even more centralised in the past 2 decades – the Scottish less than the English. They seem impervious to the lessons that lie on their (European) doorstep – that decentralised systems are healthier and more able to deal with issues. The British political parties are full of the rhetoric of people power – but when in power continue to centralise. An astonishing 70% of local government spending in the UK is controlled by central government - compared with 19% in Germany and 32% in France.
I therefore stopped watching developments on that front some time ago – but seem, as a result, to have missed an interesting initiative which took place in the Brown years – something called Total place. This encouraged municipalities and local state bodies to come together; identify how much was being spent on particular problems eg drug treatment; and to rethink the services with a smaller budget. 13 pilots were selected and helped by some universities. The results seemed to be promising and give a new legitimacy and role for local government – as is seen in this final report; and handbook . The focus on clients – rather than departments – is radical and clearly could be taken seriously only because of economic and budgetary crisis. Part of its thinking can be traced back to the zero-budgeting ideas of the 1960s and 1970s and indeed I came across a comment from an interesting guy, Des McConaghy, I had contact with in those days -

it is intolerably frustrating – almost 40 years later and at 80 years of age! – seeing so many “total approach” initiatives come and go – decade after decade; each inevitably failing for much the same reasons as each new generation “starts from square one”. The landscape is strewn with their wreckage. So it’s now up to the Cabinet Office to really get to grips with the actual policy implications of localism. They must see that while this does indeed mean massively devolving all that can be safely left to the localities it also means a better grip on Whitehall’s own strategic role – plus the management and political validation of that vital constituency dimension!

However, the Handbook is a very rare celebration of systems thinking - it is very well-presented and shows how the concept and its operation draws on different strands of thinking (eg group-grid theory which I referred to recently; styles of learning; dialogue etc). It is very rare for an official document to refer to such theoretical grounding. My only beef is that there are few hard examples of the results in the Handbook. For that you have to go to the individual Final Report eg from Birmingham.
My internet search, however, suggests that the Total Place initiative seems, despite (because of?)its hype, to have disappeared without a trace with the arrival of the Coalition Government - being replaced by another pilot (this time in 2 places only) called Community Budgets. The "Prospectus" (typical business language) about the concept fails to mention the "total place" work even once. Instead, the phrase "whole-place" is used. Why do politicians need to behave so childishly?
Just what local government can offer particularly in this part of the world is nicely shown in this Local Government and Public Services book
The painting is a new acquisition - from last night's auction, It's by Grigor Naidenov who was born in Sofia in 1895 and focussed on urban life and scenes
Breaking news; The UK Deputy PM announced at the weekend that the English cities would get the chance to be free of a lot of central regulations - if, that is, he succeeded in his ongoing battle with the civil servants.

Bankers as communist nomenklatura?

2011-12-05T22:17:00.003+02:00

In a nutshell, the governments that saved the banks and financial markets from a meltdown by borrowing huge amounts of monies are now being attacked for having too much debt by the institutions they saved.

This is just one of several arresting passages in a stimulating Open Democracy article I’ve just received and which argues that the banks have, over the past decade, broken the basic rules of lending - which normally allow only 6 pounds to be created from a single pound deposit and which ensure that 13% of every deposit is kept as a bank deposit. In its place, he argues, has been created a Ponzi scheme. The article continues -

The bankers and financiers do not own banks and financial institutions. They are owned by pension funds, saving policies and endowment policy holders, and even by governments and taxpayers. Effectively, the tax-paying middle class who saves and invests owns the financial industry which is in turn under the management of the bankers and financiers, the nomenklatura of the 21st century. And, like in the Soviet style communism system, these financial apparatchiks are not accountable to anybody but only interested in short term gains and squeezing as much as possible from anyone who has any money and cannot escape: by and large middle class taxpayers
In the 10 years leading to the collapse of 2008, the financial system abandoned the fiat currency and fractional reserve banking. This was the system wereby the money, as the store of value, was underwritten by individual countries and multiplied in a controlled way. Instead, the financiers and bankers started practicing a depleting reserve banking technique: a mechanism that replaces the currency, i.e. fiat money and legal tenders in the banks' reserves (in terms of their ratio) by papers generated by the banks themselves.

The author, Greg Pytel, has an interesting looking blog which rates second in UK blogs about corporate finance and submitted in early 2009 a damning paper to a House of Commons committee with the great title The Largest Heist in History

A Chief Executive of a Bank was one of apparently only a few who took issue with the argument and their exchange can be seen here.
Need to ask someone like Paul Mason what he makes of the argument.

The picture shows a rare painting by Alexander Bozhinov which is being auctioned soon here in Sofia. He was a one of Bulgaria's great caricaturists (whose house I lived next door to recently) but this is actually a painting he did on wood in Berlin in 1927

vegetables, books, grids and groups

2011-12-03T13:43:00.007+02:00

The vegetable shop on the corner is the busiest shop I have ever known – although it does seem to be the older generation which uses it. Well-stocked and –frequented vegetable shops are a great feature of Sofia.
It would be interesting to know whether this healthy diet is reflected in Bulgarian health statistics…although any undoubted benefits will be swamped by the effects of smoking!
Certainly when I lived here for 18 months in 2007/2009, it made a significant (positive) difference to my cholesterol level.
So the verandah here is groaning with leeks, pears, beetroot, brocoli, gigantic parsnip, celery etc

I’m not sure if my love of reading and buying books technically qualifies me as a "bibliophile” since the dictionary defines that as "someone who loves or collects books especially as examples of fine or unusual printing or biding”. But I have always admired typface and regret that few publishers give information about the typeface used – or indeed seem to recognise that such an aesthetic consideration might actually help sell their products. I was therefore delighted to read this article which indicates that beautiful book covers are making a comeback. I also discovered that there is a website which celebrates the aesthetics of reading with the delightful name of bookporn.

Talking of books, when I looked recently at my ecological footprint, I forgot to factor in my use of Amazon books. A recent article paints a rather chilling picture of what it’s alike to work in one of their warehouses.

"Aha!" (or eureka) moments are an important but neglected part of life – when complexity and confusion momentarily clear and a strong ray of sunshine reveals a "truth”. I vividly remember that when I first read, in the 1970s, the section of Etzioni’s Social Problems which set out the stories which lay behind and sustained the individualistic, hierarchic and egalitarian perceptions and responses to social problems. The same happened in 1999 when I discovered Chris Hood's The Art of the State – rhetoric, culture and public management. This book uses Mary Douglas’grid-group theory to reduce the whole literature on admin reform to four basic schools. “Grid” denotes the degree to which our lives are circumscribed by rules – “group” indicates the extent to which we are governed by group choice. This gives a matrix of -
• Hierarchist (high on both)
• individualist (low on both)
• Egalitarian (high on group; low on grid)
• Fatalist (high on grid; low on group)

More interestingly, he then shows their typical policy responses, weaknesses and strengths. Sadly, neither the Etzioni nor Hood book is available on google – although this article by Hood demonstrates the use which can be made of the typology. The link I've given ábove for Mary Douglas is actually a very interesting piece in which she reflects on the origins of her theory - and how it developed. It's rare that one gets such an insight into a concept's origins and development from the author. Too often and too quickly concepts become reified.

I had another "aha!" moment when I found recently The case for clumsiness which, again, sets out the various stories which sustain the different positions people take us on various key policy issues – such as the environment. There is a good interview with the author here and a short summary here

Rediscovery of political economy

2011-12-02T19:10:00.002+02:00

I have referred several times to the radical rethinking of the economics discipline and also of psychology and regretted that there was little sign of such reassessment of basic principles in the schools of management – let alone in those of public management which continue to regurgitate so many of the hoary myths of management from the surreal world of management writing.
In fact, I now realise, some people – in and around The World Bank of all places – have been engaged in some basic reappraisals of relevant literature for administrative reform efforts and producing some very readable documents. They are those associated with the World Bank’s recent Governance Reforms under real world conditions written around the central questions for my work as a consultant -
1. How do we build broad coalitions of influentials in favour of change? What do we do about powerful vested interests?
2. How do we help reformers transform indifferent, or even hostile, public opinion into support for reform objectives?
3. How do we instigate citizen demand for good governance and accountability to sustain governance reform?

I realise I keep repeating these questions (and the reference) but the questions are so rarely asked in practice let alone pursued seriously in transition countries - and the book is quite excellent. This morning, the WB drew my attention to three useful bits of training material to back up that work.
Interestingly, the displines they draw on are political economy and communications. Both are dear to my heart – the first being the neglected Scottish intellectual tradition which was (just) still alive in my university days - although this useful paper from the Asian development Bank on the subject credits the first use of the term to a 17th century Frenchman. This paper from the ODI gives examples of its use to ensure that development interventions are on a firm basis.

A new website offers an advance copy of an article on an overdue subject – corporate psychopaths and their role in the global crisis.

Pursuing ones passions

2011-12-01T10:12:00.001+02:00

For some time, I’ve been fascinated that my most popular post by far is the one from a year ago entitled "adversarial and consensual systems” which has been viewed almost 600 times without any prompting on my part – 130 of these in the last month.
The post actually gives an account of what I would call the "catholicism" of my approach to life (I don’t understand how this word can also have this meaning of "breadth”) - and the number of times this led me into bipartisan activity which never went down well with my immediate political colleagues.

It’s actually highly ironic that, at age 26, I was elevated by my political colleagues to the post of Secretary of the Labour group on the municipality since my commitment (in both practice and writing) to community development challenged the whole edifice of political parties. Two years later I also took the post of Chairman of the recently established Social Work authority – which allowed me to pursue an agenda of what we now call inclusiveness at both a neighbourhood and town level. I suppose they gave me my head since the energy and openness I showed reflected well on a party which had become somewhat moribund.
I used the experience to found a Local Government Unit in the nearby College where I lectured; wrote papers; and organised workshops about the new promise of corporate management and community development. Quite a recipe! And it positioned me well when a large and powerful Region was created in 1974 covering half of Scotland.
By then, my work had made me an interesting and familiar figure to the councillors who made up the controlling Labour group on the new Region – and I was again selected to act as the Secretary, one of 4 leadership positions. Elections to that position were held every two years – and I managed to hold the post until my resignation 16 or so years later. Again I was given my head on matters of social inclusion (we called it multiple deprivation then) and brought a whole new set of community- and policy-based structures into existence – as well as starting the support for social enterprise (community business as we called it).
Those were the days in which national government largely left us alone in local government – and we were left to blaze trails. Local government since then has become very boring in the UK with municipalities press-ganged to serve the latest central government wheeze.

But the power base of the empires of Education, Roads etc was never threatened by all this activity. And I was too much the loner – working with allies in officialdom, community groups etc, writing papers for national journals rather than spending the necessary time in the smoke-filled rooms with indifferent or hostile colleagues who chaired these sorts of committess and were in cahoots with their Directors. A paper on my website summarises the 16-year experience of developing and managing these policies – and the lessons I found myself drawing in the early 1990s (thanks to a fellowship the Glasgow-based Urban Studies magazing gave me in 1996)

And then, one day in late October 1990, I found myself on the North Sea on a ferry to Copenhagen, beginning a completely new life as a technocratic adviser in central europe – supposed to be helping them build up government systems. It would be nice to say that the commitments and insights of my earlier life have informed my new life of the past 20 years – but this has rarely been the case. Although the early work in central europe was with local government systems, I steadily moved to national government issues – particularly relating to the establishment of a more meritocratic civil service. All the time I was learning as mch as advising – particularly about how other European countries operated (fortunately I had developed good European networks in the 1980s). My great success was in Azerbaijan of all places – in setting up a Civil Service Agency which is still going strong.
But the last 6 years have focussed on training systems and programmes. I don’t pretend to be an expert on this subject – but my background has given me the confidence to challenge some of the sloppy thinking I encounter in this field. Recent blogposts have tried to summarise these thoughts – and I am now trying to integrate these with a paper I wrote in 2008. The results I hope to put on the website soon.

So I have been a very lucky man – free (and paid) to pursue my passions. It’s one of the reasons I feel unable to offer advice to young people. Apart from the fact that these are much more difficult times, I just happened to be in (or manoeuvre myself into) the right place at the right time.

This blog has been a useful focus in the past 2 years for my thoughts and reading. But I have probably reached the point when I need to be more disciplined. One of the blogs I admire posts only every Wednesday – and this is perhaps a format I should be thinking of.

A Citizen's Bible?

2011-11-28T11:05:00.002+02:00

I have to confess to some ennui – like my gout, an affliction of the privileged! Perhaps the absence of the edge the white wine brought to my pallet accounts for a certain reduction in zest. More likely, I have simply run out of „projects”. A daily blog no longer supplies the focus.

In March last year I suggested that, as both mainstream economics and psychology were undergoing major challenge, it was time that the scholastic discipline of public management had this sort of overhaul The only popular book on the subject I can think of was Reinventing Government (1991) by David Osbourne and Ted Gaebler – which did not, however, attempt an overview of the topic but was rather proselytise for neo-liberalism.
Economics and psychology, of course, are subjects dear to the heart of everyone – and economists and psychologists figures of both power and ridicule. Poor old public administration and its experts are hardly in the same league! But not only does noone listen to them – the scholars are embarrassed to be caught even writing for a bureaucratic or political audience.
And yet the last two decades have seen ministries and governments everywhere embark on major upheavals of administrative and policy systems – the very stuff of public administration. But the role of the scholars has (unlike the 2 other disciplines) been simply to observe, calibrate and comment. No theory has been developed by scholars equivalent to the power of the "market”, "competitive equilibrium” or "the unconscious” – unless, that is, you count Weber’s "rational-legal bureaucracy” or Robert Michels "iron law of oligarchy”. Somehow Lindblom's "disjointed incrementalism" never caught on as a public phrase!
Those behind the marketising prescriptions of New Public Management (NPM) were not from the public admin stable – but rather from Public Choice Economics and from the OECD – and the role of PA scholars has been map its rise and apparent fall and (occasionally) to deflate its pretensions. At its best, this type of commentary and analysis is very useful – few have surpassed Chris Hood’s masterly dissection of NPM 20 years ago. This set out for the first time the basic features of (and arguments for) the disparate elements which had characterised the apparently ad-hoc series of measures seen in the previous 15 years in the UK, New Zealand and Australia – and then suggests that the underlying values of NPM (what he calls the sigma value of efficiency) are simply one of three clusters of adminstrative values – the other two being concerned with rectitude (theta value) and resilience (lamda value). Table 2 of the paper sets this out in more detail.
The trick (as with life) is to get the appropriate balance between these three. Any attempt to favour one at the expense of the others (NPM) will lead inevitably to reaction and is therefore unstable.
This emphasis on the importance of balance was the focus of a very good (but neglected) paper which Henry Mintzberg published in 2000 (which I’ve mentioned before on the blog) about the Management of Government which starts with the assertion that it was not capitalism which won in 1989 but "the balanced model” ie a system in which there was some sort of balance between the power of commerce, the state and the citizen. Patently the balance has swung too far in the intervening 20 years!
Incidentally I see from Mintzbergs (rather disappointing) website that he is working on a book on this theme with the title Rebalancing Society; radical renewal beyond Smith and Marx. Mintzberg is a very sane voice in a mad world – ás is obvious from this article on managing quietly and his ten musings on management.
Hood elaborates on these three sets of values in the book he published at the same time with Michael Jackson - Administrative Argument (sadly out of print) - when he set out 99 (conflicting) proverbs used in organisational change.
In 2007, Russell Ackoff, the US strategic management guru, published a more folksy variant of this proverbs approach – The F Laws of management a short version of which can be read here. We desperately need this sort of approach applied to the "reformitis” which has afflicted bureaucrats and politicians in the past 20 years.

One of the few claims I feel able to make with confidence about myself is that I am well-read (see the (admittedly out-of-date annotated bibliography for change agents on my website). But I know of no book written for the concerned citizen which gives a realistic sense BOTH of the forces which constrain political action AND of the possibilities of creating a more decent society.
A book is needed which –
• Is written for the general public
* is not associated with discredited political parties (which, by definition, sell their souls)
• Sets out the thinking which has dominated government practices of the past 20 years; where it has come from; and what results it has had (already well done in academia see the Pal paper on the role of the OECD)
• Gives case studies – not of the academic sort but more fire in the belly stuff which comes, for example, from the pen of Kenneth Roy in the great crusading Emag he edits and eg the tale which should be shouted from the rooftops of the collusion of so many public figures with the activities of the cowboys who run privatised companies which are trying to muscle in on (and make profit from) public services.

Perhaps I should try to produce such a book? Various authors have already put in place some of the building blocks – eg Peter du Gay ("come back bureaucracy"); Chris Pollitt (in The Essential Public Manager); some of the work on public value by Mark Moore and others; even Geoff Mulgan's Good and Bad Power (which, sadly, I found impossible to finish.

Social Science as Sorcery

2011-11-26T16:55:00.008+02:00

This is a period of my life when I try to sort out the sense and the nonsense from what I have absorbed from the social science literature which I first started to take seriously some 50 years ago. In those days, economics and the study of organisations were the focus of serious intellectual study – but by a tiny minority and in a highly rarified atmosphere. The 1960s was, however, when social science teaching started to expand in universities and make claims for itself which have only recently started to be questioned. A tiny minority of courageous academics did try to blow the whistle earlier - in particular Prof Stanislav Andreski in his magnificent 1972 book Social Science as Sorcery.
The Economics trade has been under increasing attack for about a decade – from behavioural economists and others – but its pretensions blown apart by the ongoing global crisis. But management thinking has, arguably, done equal damage to our societies and has escaped proper scrutiny - which is why I want to draw your attention to Chris Grey's A Very Short, Fairly Interesting and Reasonably Cheap Book about Studying Organisations which I found myself this week reading for the third time in a short period (a first for me). Although I;ve mentioned the book before, this is the first time I have tried to capture some of the more powerful points it makes.
• "imagine a world where the thing which dominated it (God; the Party) was written about in one of three ways. One was like a bible, very heavy and dorthodox. The second was amusing and readable but didn’t tell you anything you couldn’t think for yourself. The third seemed to say some things you wouldn’t think yourself and suggested flaws in the Bible but you couldn’t understand it because it was so obscurely written. Such is the literature of organisations - in which we live our lives and yet are served by only Textbooks; pop management; and unreadable scholarly books or articles".
• Writers on organisations belong to one of two schools – those who believe "there exists an observable, objective organisational reality which exists independent of organisation theory. The task of OT is to uncover this reality and discover the laws by which it operates – and perhaps then to predict if not control future events. They tend to favour quantitative research. These are the positivists. Then there is a second camp which denies this scientific view – they might be called constructivists or relativists since, for them, organisational reality is constructed by people in organisations and by organisation theory”.
• The history of organisation theory you find in textbooks generally starts with the concept of "bureaucracy” as defined by Weber and with that of "scientific management” as set out by FW Taylor - both of whom were active in a 25 year period from the late 1880s to the end of the first world war, one as a (legal) academic in Prussia, the other as an engineer and early consultant in American steel mills in Pennsylvania.
• Weber was curious about the various motives there have been over history and societies for obedience. Why exactly have we accepted the authority of those with power? His answer gave us a typology of authority we still use today – "traditional", "charismatic" and what he called "rational-legal” which he saw developing in his time. A system of (fair) rules which made arbitrary (privileging) behaviour difficult. But this was an "ideal type” (ie a model) – not necessarily a precise description or prescription. Indeed studies from the mid 1950s showed just how much informal power there was in bureacracies.
• Taylor worked in an industry where it was normal for workers to organise their own work; and where owners tended to be Presbyterean and workers catholic immigrants. Taylor reckoned there was a lot of slacking going on – and applied a "scientific” approach to devise standards and measures of performance (time and motion) as well as "scientific” selection of workers and a strict separation of workers and managers.
• This caused strong reactions not only amongst workers but from many owners and only survived thanks to the production needs of the First World War
• The "evacuation of meaning” from work was intensified by Fordism.
• the "human resource” approach to management which followed was not the fundamental break which the textbooks portray but rather a cleverer legitimisation of management power – as was the cultural management (and TQM) of the latter part of the 20th century.
• Although managers call the shots, their organisational fashions always fail – because of unintended effects
• Business schools do not produce better managers – but rather give the breeed legitimisation; self-confidence; a shared world-view and a common (mystifying) language

One quote perhaps captures his argument "For all the talk about new paradigms, contemporary organisation theory and management method remain remarkably unchanged from their classical roots….because the underlying philosophy of instrumental rationality and control remains firmly in the ascendant”

In the 1970s we had people like Ivan Illich and Paolo Freire exposing the emptiness of the doctrines which sustained the power of education and health systems. We now desperately need people like this to help us tear apart the arbitrary assumptions which sustain the legitimacy of the new priests of technocracy. Daniel Dorling's recent book Injustice - why social inequality persists is exceptional because he tries to identify and then challenge the belief systems which sustain our present inequities.

There are hundreds of thousands of academics receiving public money to teach and research so-called social "sciences" in universities and public institutions. The vast majority of them, whether they realise it or not, have been part of a large brain-washing exercise. A few of them only have broken ranks - not just the economists I have mentioned but those (generally American) sociologists who, for a few years, have been advocating what they call "public sociologies". Michael Burrawoy has been one of the main protagonists. Noone, however, should be under any illusions about the difficulties of making an intellectual challenge on this field of management and organisation studies in which so many brains, reputations and careers are now entrenched

Living without the luxuries

2011-11-23T10:04:00.004+02:00

Monday early saw me at the Military hospital again – this time to a floor so munificent it must have been designed for the Generals and Admirals! High uric acid was confirmed and I was referred to a specialist colleague who has put me on a diet for a few weeks which excludes alcohol and meat. What a torture to be in Bulgaria and denied access to its superb wines and rakias! Particulary after rediscovering the shop which supplies Karlovo wines straight from the barrel! And ironic that the post from a year ago reproduced the text from a gravestone which celebrated someone's skills in producing drink
Reminds me of the refrain in my favourite Romanian poem – "cut out the wine!”.
The post from the 21st is also worth looking at again - it traced the writing over the past 50 years which has tried (unsuccessfully it seems) to persuade us to live a simpler and more social life
The New Yorker has a good piece of background reporting on one of the key figures behind the Occupy Wall St movement.

And a UK Think Tank has issued a report on some of the elements of the "good society” which has become an important theme in one strand of social democratic re-thinking in Europe.

It’s nice to be able to report on one celebrity figure actually helping to create a more sustainable form of housing.

Finally, it's the time of the year when Vihra of the Astry Gallery here delights us with her 30by30 annual exhibition The sketch is an Ilyia Beshkov - very appropriate!

mainline medical experience

2011-11-19T18:56:00.005+02:00

So many books and paintings accumulated in 7 months in Sofia - that moving flats (back to the warmer one I had 3 years ago) proved more strenuous than I had imagined. Perhaps that’s why my big toe decided to swell – and led to more contact with the medical systems here in Sofia. The local medical centre decided after only a brief conversation that this was not for them and directed me to the Military Hospital nearby. It must be one of the largest buildings in the city – only a couple of bus-stops from the new flat off Hristo Botev Bvd. A friendly receptionist and passerby had me at a doctor in a few minutes who decided I needed to see a dermatologist. It was 13.50 when I reached the relevant corridor – and became an early part of a queue which steadily built up over the next 45 minutes with no sign of life inside the door a notice on which told us that consultations started at 14.00. Eventually a couple of women arrived – and, after 10 minutes, started to take people. I was told that I needed to have a blood test and to return with the result at 14.00 next day. A note was duly written specifying the checks which were needed after which I asked about payment. I was told that the charge was 15 euros and that I would have to go the 18th floor to make the payment – if, that is, I wanted a receipt. As I didn’t, the payment was made on the spot. I have to wonder hpw many others do the same thing. It depends presumably on whether the cash is subsequently reimbursed. The doctor gave me her business card and indicated her mobile number.
The “army laboratory” was closed by the time I reached it. At 08.30 the next day, I therefore joined another queue which moved quickly and paid another 15 euros to a receptionist who duly typed up the specification. After a 5 minute wait, I was admitted to the surgery – and asked for the doctor’s name (which was clearly not on the note she had written). Any statistics will therefore show the amount of blood tests given – but will be unable to attribute the source of demand.

At 11.00 I returned, as requested, for the result; and at 14.00 presented myself at the doctor’s cabinet clutching said results. I was alone – and again no sign of life. Another friendly doctor checked and told me the doctor had left the hospital for the day - it transpired that her daughter was ill and she had forgotten about the appointment. I have to return at 08.30 Monday – although I was duly warned that the people I am dealing with are diagnosticians only and that I will need to be referred elsewhere for treatment.

This compartmentalization is what I find so difficult about the medical systems everywhere – in Scotland I had a MRI scan for my weak knees a few years back and all the guy could tell me was that I had no physical debility. No advice on other options to pursue. I have had to assume that it is arthritic. Not surprising that I have lost confidence in medics. Either they are generalists – or diagnosticians – who merely refer. Or specialists who are trained only to identify and deal with their own specialism. As the old truism has it – “if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail”! Apparently we owe this saying to Maslow – of self-actualisation fame

Not much time for thinking or reading about weightier matters – but a couple of posts which seem to me to go to the essence of the Euro crisis and also here.

The Western interventions of the past 15 years have seen a lot of political and academic rationalisations and protests; and few considered analyses. A recent, short book by a couple of people with very extensive personal experience promises to right the balance. It’s “Can Intervention Work?” A New York Times article had this to say about it -

Rory Stewart castigates the international community for its irrelevant data sets, flow charts and attempts to define “best practices.” He worries that “a culture of country experts has been replaced by a culture of consultants” who travel everywhere with jargon: “Lofty abstractions such as ‘ungoverned space,’ ‘the rule of law’ and ‘the legitimate monopoly on the use of violence’ are so difficult to apply to an Afghan village that it was almost impossible to know when they were failing.” At Harvard, where he directed a human rights center, Stewart struggled to convince his congenitally optimistic American students of his stark conclusion: “The international community necessarily lacked the knowledge, the power and the legitimacy to engage with politics at a local provincial level.” If we are to intervene at all, we must do so with modest expectations and a sure sense that “less is often more” and that “we had no moral obligation to do what we could not do.” In a companion essay, Stewart’s former Harvard colleague Gerald Knaus defends the West’s intervention in Bosnia while arguing for an ethic of “principled incrementalism.” While “there is encouraging evidence that limited missions in support of peace agreements and with sufficient resources can produce a good result,” he concludes, the prospects for “nation-building under fire” are much worse

.Finally two sets of wonderful paintings - by Scottish and Russian women of more than a century ago.

Alternative medicine, healing - or scam?

2011-11-15T13:47:00.009+02:00

I want to recount a sad experience I had on Sunday here in Bulgaria - near Veliko Trnovo. Since a hill walk in the Kyrgyz mountains in 2006 I have had weak (and occasionally painful) knees. The Magnetic Resonance machine (in Glasgow) couldn’t identify any physical deterioration – and left me to conclude that my condition was arthritic. I was therefore easy prey when a friend suggested I try some foot reflexology from a Bulgarian who had returned home after a successful practice in Italy. He took me in 2009 or so for my first (painful) hour’s treatment. It didn’t make any difference – but I was persuaded it needed a course of treatment. After all, when (some 25 years ago) no physical therapist could deal with a previous knee pain I had, it was (apparently) sorted out in a short session by a guy who just massaged it – all the while dangling a pendant like a metronome.
And last Thursday started – after a 3 hour journey from Sofia - what I thought would be such a course. An hour’s session cost me 50 levs – which I considered reasonable since a massage would have cost me about 60 (although leaving me more invigorated). I returned on Sunday for the second session – which was only 30 minutes (I had been made to wait an hour and needed to be back in Sofia by 16.00) – and was shocked to be asked for 50 euros – effectively 4 times the previous week’s rate (double the price for less than half the time). I was told two things – first that they had made a mistake the previous week, charging me the rate for Bulgarians (foreigners were 50 euros – Romanians too???). And, second, that what counted was not the length of the session (it’s not massage!) but the effectiveness. But I had no pain when I arrived – so lack of immediate pain (apart from the bones he had pressed) was no measure. I would be happy to pay by results – but that was never on offer! The “healer” (for that is the term I have discovered they use on the website which is still under construction) just decided to stop my treatment in order to give someone else treatment who was also in a hurry.
I confess I was a bit annoyed by the guy’s abruptness – and lack of interest in the information I tried to convey to him about a skin condition I have - and the small wooden roller he used was duly beginning to tear my skin
I had noticed some time ago that the Bulgarians have a great belief in spiritual energy - which does leave them vulnerable to people we northerners would regard as quacks. And last october the Bulgarian authorities were threatening to tighten up on "healers".

Coda
A Bulgarian reader who has received and seen Mitio's treatment has been in touch to argue Mitio's corner. He draws attention to the many people who have clearly benefited from the treatment. I am sure that his treatment has helped many people and admit that part of my concern is the language of "healing" since this, for me, is getting close to calling oneself a "miracle-worker" which my world-view has difficulty accepting. I readily accept that there are a lot of things man does not and probably never will explain with current methodologies. But would be more comfortable with the term "therapist" - and if he showed some humility about other (complementary) approaches. Clearly, for example, what one eats (and drinks) does affect one's body. Man ist was man isst! For example, a coupleof days later, I had a painful swelling in a big toe - and the blood test at the hosptital identified high uric acid. They immediately put me on a diet of no meat or wine (and lots of water) for 4 weeks - after which we will test again. And my body seem to appreciate the new diet!
And it is certainly a problem for me that (a) I don't know what technique he is using (is it reflexology?) and (b) that I don't get any feedback. I can share his view of the medical profession - but he equally needs to accept that people need information and feedback; and that his treatment may not necessarily be appropriate in all cases.
.

What would Google Do?

2011-11-14T11:37:00.004+02:00

In fact, What Would Google Do? proved to be an engrossing and thought-provoking read – although the early stuff about turning customer complaints on their head (as it were) and using them as an intelligence tool to help improve design and/or maintenance is the stuff of common sense which I used forty years ago when I was a young politician trying to reshape municipal services. Except that, now, Blogs, Twitter and Facebook clearly give “the crowd” (that’s us) much more power – and not only negative (complaint) but positive – “your customers are your ad agency”. Later in the book, indeed, he explores the likelihood that various “middlemen” organizations such as advertising agencies may indeed become redundant. One review put it well

The principles he unearths from close observation of Google’s practices range from the obvious, like the importance of enabling customers to collaborate with you, to the apparently mystical mantra “focus on the user and all else will follow”.
In the second part of the book Jarvis offers ideas and suggestions for how various industry sectors can become more “Googley”, and although many of the proposals are more imaginative and speculative than realisable, by the end you get a real sense of the transformative power of applying the principles he has outlined. The core assumptions of transparency, connectedness and openness really do make a difference, and business models in the media, the car industry, venture capital and even the benighted banking sector would be transformed if they were taken seriously.
Sitting at the core is the desire to do more with data, to take the details of our daily lives, aggregate them with the information that companies inevitably gather and then – and this is the Googley bit – give us access so we can make our own choices eg a restaurant that open sources its menu and lets customers rate the wines as well as the service, Jarvis’s goal is to help us all to think differently.
It doesn’t always work, and the attempt to contrast Al Gore’s approach to solving the problems of global warming through regulation and control with that of Google’s founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, who want to invest in finding ways to reduce the cost of renewable energy, ends up as an unconvincing paean to the free-market worldview that now seems rather dated in the midst of a banking-induced recession. But the overall tone is of infectious optimism in the power of innovation that is remarkably convincing.

I wasn’t quite so convinced. At one stage I started to wonder about the profile of these energetic and restless complainers who rush to put their experiences online and use comparative data to make their purchase decisions. It sounds suspiciously much like an idealisation of the rational (wo)man which is the basis of the economics doctrine which has just been blown away and is being replaced by behavioural economics. However, his section on the future of the book is provocative –

books are frozen in time without the means to be updated or corrected, except via new editions. They aren’t searchable in print. They create a one-way relationship. They tend not to teach authors. They cannot link directly to related knowledge, debate and sources as the internet can. They are expensive to produce. They depend on shelf space. They kill trees. There are only a few winners (20%) and the rest are losers.

Except that browsing a remaindered book section is an exercise in discovery. As the first review puts it -

deep down this is not really a book about Google as much as an extended meditation on the benefits of innovation, openness and the imaginative use of new technologies of networking and information processing. Jarvis uses Google’s undoubted success and continued development as a fulcrum for his rhetorical lever, attempting to move corporations, governments, educational institutions and the medical establishment away from their settled practices and into a space where innovation can flourish and where creative destruction leads to progress.

A critical review is here. The author uses his website to compose his books and there is an interesting assessment of some of the reviews of his latest here.
Two years ago I blogged about the Zhukoff book Support Capitalism which has a more measured (if more inaccessible) assessment

An opportunity to catch up

2011-11-09T20:18:00.001+02:00

I will probably be out of access to the internet for the next few days – so please take the opportunity to check back on recent posts – most of which have dealt with the role of training public officials in countries emerging from autocratic rule. Or check the posts from exactly a year ago – for example the one for 10 November 2010 had a section which suggested we allow the wrong sort of people to be honoured and celebrated -

the first twenty years of my life, I focussed on the political – the "what”. The last 20 years the focus has been on the "how”- on reforming the machinery of government. I’m still interested in the latter but, as the masthead quotation from JR Saul indicates, I think the value of technocrats is overrated and the role of citizens and the maligned politicians has to be asserted. And one of the things wrong with a lot of the reform writing is that it is too abstract. Change is a question of individuals – and we need more of the naming and shaming approach which I used myself for the first time a year ago when I picked out a State Secretary and analysed his (outdated) declaration of interest form which appeared on the Ministry website.
We also need to celebrate more those who are trying to make a positive mark on life – and, as I noted on a recent friend obituary, while they are still alive. One of the reasons I enjoyed Paul Kingsnorth’s book One No; many Yeses on the protests against the iniquities inflicted on the world by multi-national corporations is that it focussed on the individuals in different parts of the world who are risking their lives and livelihoods to protest against the destruction being wrought by people running these organisations. Business has been using the journal “portrait” for a long time to glorify their class – and most management books are little else than hero creation and worship. Only women like Rosabeth Kantor (with her marvellously mocking ten-rules-for-stifling-innovation and Shoshana Zuboff, it seems, are capable of resisting this inclination of business writers! But you don’t find such positive write-up of reformers – presumably because media ownership is so neo-liberal. And the publications of the reform movement tend to concentrate on ideas.
For example, I’ve wanted for some time to say something about one of the people I admire most – a Slovak friend of mine who, as Director of a training centre run on cooperative lines in a village, has utterly transformed an old palace, building up not only the facilities it offers (and the labour force) but commissioning local artists to create glorious murals to remind us of the place’s historical heritage and holding vernissages with painters from central europe, the Balkans, Central Asia etc. Walk into his huge office and he is almost lost amongst the books and paintings which are piled up around his desk. And his house is like a (living) museum – from all the artefacts he has brought back from his vacations throughout the world. He is such a lovely, modest man and I always feel a taste of heaven when I visit him at the Mojmirovce Kastiel.

I was stumped a few months back when I was asked who were the people I admired? Apart from a few inspirational friends such as my Slovak friend, the people I admire are those who have a combination of vision, social justice and communication for example Peter Drucker; Leopold Kohr; George Orwell; JK Galbraith; Ivan Illich; C Wright Mills; Ernst Schumacher. They’re all dead!

And the November 12 post poses four basic questions which are always worth posing and exploring.
So have a good rummage while I'm away......there is some good stuff there....

Leaders of change

2011-11-09T14:06:00.005+02:00

New readers should note that this blog is a great resource for those concerned about the apparent collapse of key elements of our core systems – and what we should be doing about it. My blogs rarely comment on the trivia which passes for News these days (although I couldn’t resist the recent grilling of Rupert Murdoch by a UK House of Commons Committee) and try to strike a reasonable tone. They alternate between the professional and political aspects of improving governance (particularly in "transition countries" – a combination which gives these posts a distinctive slant. Most of my posts give direct links to papers which give hard evidence of my points. A bit like Google Scholar, I try to stand on the shoulders of giants. Indeed one of the reasons I keep blogging is that I find it is a great way of organising my reading. Anything which impresses me gets worked in; without the blog I would be wasting time trying to find a paper which I knew said something important. Now all I have to do is punch a keyword into the search engine on the site – and hey presto! The blogs are therefore (I hope) more like perennial flowers which can be enjoyed even if a couple of years old. And I am pleased to see that some of my readers do that without being urged.
Exactly a year ago I had a lament on impotence of democratic politicswhich shows you what I mean.

From October 28, I devoted a series of posts to the issue of the role of training in improving the performance of state bodies in ex-communist countries. I was pretty critical – particularly of the EC funding strategy.
The second post in the series summarised my critique and suggested three paths which those in charge of such training in these countries needed to take to make an impact -

1. to signal that the development of state capacity needs to be taken more seriously – by officials, politicians and academics – and to give practical examples of what this means
2. to try to shine some light on the role of training in individual learning and organisational development – to show both the potential of and limits on training and to have the courage to spell out the preconditions for training which actually helps improve the performance of state bodies
3. to encourage training institutes to cooperate more with change agents in the system - and with academia

Part V tried to put us in the shoes of a Director of the National Institute of training of public servants in these countries – facing incredible constraints - and to expand on these three points. Part VII switched the focus back to the funders and tried to reduce the critique to a few bullet points - "Wrong focus; wrong theory"; "context" and "leadership" and then went on to give an illustration of the sort of cooperation which might pay dividends for a Director of a Training Institute.
A final post backtracked a bit to ask what we actually know about the process of developing the administrative capacity which I had made the core of my argument.
It also noted that I should now explore why on earth anyone facing the sort of political and budgetary constraints which exist in the Balkan countries (widely defined) should ever wish to put her head over the parapet and "think big and reach out” as I had earlier suggested . So here goes……

I did make the point very strongly in the posts that each country has to make its own way – each context is very different and requires something which resonates with its key actors. Locals who bring foreign experience (like most think-tankers) are generally just trying to make a name for themselves as can be seen in this (otherwise interesting) book of case studies from the countries which were in the more direct influence of the Soviet Union.
But I am who I am am; my context (at least for the first 25 years of my working life) was the strong bureaucratic system of Scottish local government – which owned the vast proportion of the housing and transport system. I challenged this system – before Margaret Thatcher appeared on the scene – but from a new left and participative rather than privatising perspective.
And I had a lot of allies – first in men and women (more the latter) who worked in impossible circumstances of low income and insecurity – but who had the guts and energy to try to make a better lives for those around them. And, secondly, in a few officials who realised that if they did not use their position, skills and knowledge to try to make things better, then we would soon hit rock bottom. Mark Moore tried to legitimise the work of such committed officials in his 1995 Public Value book.

It is extraordinary people who make things change – sometimes, of course, for the worse. We have been brainwashed in the past 2 decades to believe that change was always for the better – the default option in the dreadful language. I linked yesterday to a Monbiot article which quoted from an important recent book identifying the psychotic element in so many corporate leaders – which has been a theme since Alaister Mant’s Leaders We Deserve. Malcolm Gladwell shows that even the recently deceased and highly regarded Steve Jobs had many elements of dysfunctionality in his pursuit of perfection.
And psychotic management seems to be in an even healthier state in ex-communist countries – although at least one book has tried to celebrate local heroes willing and able to make a difference.

In 2000, Malcolm Gladwell’s famous book The Tipping Point argued that the attainment of the "tipping point" (that transforms a phenomenon into an influential trend) usually requires the intervention of a number of influential types of people - not just a sinle "leader". On the path toward the tipping point, many trends are ushered into popularity by small groups of individuals that can be classified as Connectors, Mavens, and Salesmen.
Connectors are individuals who have ties in many different realms and act as conduits between them, helping to engender connections, relationships, and “cross-fertilization” that otherwise might not have ever occurred.
Mavens are people who have a strong compulsion to help other consumers by helping them make informed decisions.
Salesmen are people whose unusual charisma allows them to be extremely persuasive in inducing others to take decisions and change their behaviour.
Hopefully my next post will be able to make proper use of all of these references!!

Management as religion

2011-11-08T07:49:00.002+02:00

As you may perhaps have noticed, I’ve been experimenting with the title of the blog – in the belated realisation that "Balkan and Carpathian musings" may not be a phrase that people often punch into their search engine! "Better government" has the sort of technocratic note which is perhaps needed and does reflect some of the content. But what about the phrase I used yesterday - "in the public interest"? Another possible title could be "A Common Reader – since I do try to give references and excerpts from my extensive reading. On the other hand, I have always liked the metaphor of striving and exploring – indeed the designation on my new business card is "explorer and aesthete"(I actually wanted to put "epicurean" but desisted since it has contradictory meanings). My first little book (way back in the mid 1970s) was called "The Search for Democracy". Two titles of recent papers of mine reflect some of what I write about – "Just Words" and "Thoughts for Posterity" – but again have no resonance for those hitting the search engines. I need someone to explain to me the relative importance of (a) the name of the blog; (b) the title of the particular post; and (c) labels and keywords.
What frustrates me is that I have no real idea who the 40-50 people are who hit my various posts each day – nor whether they actually read the posts. Apart from the (rising) numbers each day, all I know is the location of the readers (in the past week the top 6 countries are, in descending order, Germany, Russia and central Asia, USA, South Korea, Bulgaria, Romania and UK). I don’t know how many of them actually return (eg there was a spike of 80 German page viewings last night).

Curious that I should buy at the weekend and start to read a book which announces (for the 4th or so time in my lifetime) the end of the power structures as we know them and the power which ordinary people now have – when the global demonstrations against finance capitalism demonstrate the scale of political impotence people all over the world feel. The book is one I had been recommended - What would Google Do? and I have discovered that it can be read for free in its entirety here.
It was first published in 2009 and, as far as I can understand, tries to demonstrate that the google way of doing business is the way of the future – for the public as well as the private sector – giving us all new power (though networks etc). You will get a good sense of it from this review.
From what I have read so far, I do not expect to have my sense of corporate power shattered – although I do hope to learn a bit more about how Google and internet companies operate. But the book seems to me another example of how we seem to have lost our social memory. I remember reading, in the early 1970s, books by prominent management theorists (such as Warren Bennis) and others (such as Toffler – Future Shock) which promised the end of bureaucracy. The early 1990s saw breathless books (by people such as Tom Peters) which promised the same. Forty years on, what do we have – stronger bureaucracy (now called contracting, procurement and regulatory bodies) than ever - and more autocratic and pyschotic leadership and management! And I find it significant that – as far as Google Scholar goes – Warren Bennis hardly existed.
For me, it is very strange how difficult it is to get hold of serious books which critique the whole management religion. I know that a lot of sociologists have in fact conducted such critiques but two factors make it difficult for the interested citizen (another possible title for my blog??) to access this stream of work. First the language in which (and the narrow audience for which) they write - in expensive, specialist academic journals. And, secondly, the control exerted by (large) publishing companies who have a very special interest in NOT demystifying management since they make so much money from management books – whether textbooks or airport lounge pickups. All credit therefore to Sage Publications for giving Chris Grey the opportunity to publish A Very Short, Fairly Interesting and Reasonably Cheap Book about Studying Organisations (2009 2nd edition) which, for me, contains more incendiary material than Marx, Lenin, Che Guevara and Al-Quada rolled together. It is written by an academic who can actually write clearly - and who sees it as his job to interpret for us the significant parts of academic work.

Public Interest - how innocent we were

2011-11-07T11:56:00.004+02:00

One of the really difficult things for people of my generation is to come to terms with is how venal our legislative and legal systems have become (the bankers are simply part of a complex equation). The post-war generation to which I belong was brought up with the tenets of liberal democracy - some of which you will find set out at page 6 of this paper of mine. We believed that government was responsive to public concerns; that our civic input (in whatever form - letters; political membership; political involvement and argument - not least as local councillors) would ensure the system operated in the public interest. The evidence we have seen in the last decade has, however, has forced us to the reluctant conclusion that laws are created generally to protect the rich and powerful; and that the judiciary (despite or perhaps because of its claims of impartiality) is in fact not blindfold but highly susceptible to the interests of the rich and powerful. I leave open the question of whether this is a new phenomenon - or simply one which less deferential a more educated and connected society has become aware of.
The examples I quote are first from a bastion of social democratic values (Canada) and then the better-known practitioner of venality and hypocrisy which happens to be its southern neighbour.The first article identifies the huge inequities in how banks are treated – compared with the rest of us.

They are often protected (from foreign competition); subsidized (for example, in the way capital gains tax worked), and bailed out when needed. But what do banks actually do, in return for all that money? What is their actual economic function?
Let’s cut through the mystification of high finance, and ask that simple question: What do banks do? What do bankers actually produce?
The practical answer, in concrete terms, is simple: nothing. They produce nothing.
In that, the banks are different from the real economy, where hard-working people like you and I produce actual, concrete goods and services that are useful.
Banks, and the financial sector more generally, don’t produce goods and services that are useful in their own right. They produce paper. And then they buy and sell paper, for a profit.
Here’s a little economic lesson. You can’t live off paper. You need food, clothing, and shelter to survive – not paper. And since we are human beings, not animals, we need more: we need education, and culture, and recreation, and entertainment, and security, and meaning. Those are the fundamentals of economic life. Not paper.
What is paper actually good for? You can wallpaper your house with it. You can line your birdcage with it. In a pinch, you can wipe your butt with it.
But other than that, paper is just paper. It is not concretely useful in its own right.
How do banks create that paper? Let me put it bluntly again: They create it out of thin air.
It is not an economic exaggeration to state that the private banking system has the power to create money out of thin air.
Not cash. Not currency. Only the government can produce that.
But most money in our economy – over 95% of money in our economy – is not currency. Most money consists of entries in electronic accounts. Savings accounts. Chequing accounts. Lines of credit. Credit card balances. Investment accounts.
In that electronic system, new money is created, not by printing currency, but through creating credit. Every time a bank issues someone a new loan, they are creating new money.
It’s like a big magic machine, creating money out of thin air. And it’s called the private credit system.
One of my favourite economists, John Kenneth Galbraith, put it this way: “The process by which private banks create money is so simple that the mind is repelled.”
How do they do it? They start out with some capital. Let’s say a billion dollars. Then they lend it out. Then they lend it out again. And again. And again and again, 10 or 20 or 50 times over.
Each new loan, is new money. The economy needs that money, let’s be clear. Without new money, we wouldn’t be able to pay for the stuff we make. So we’d stop making it, and we’d be in a depression.
So the creation of new money (or credit) is as essential function for the whole economy. It’s like a utility. But we’ve outsourced that crucial task to private banks. We’ve given them a legal license to print money – and the freedom and power to do it on their own terms.
Their goal is not providing the economy with a sensible, sustainable supply of the credit we need. Their goal is using their unique power to create money out of thin air, to maximize the profits of the banks, and the wealth of the shareholders.

The second article I owe to a site - Byliner - which offers simply good writing. Out of curiousity I hit this piece which tracks how the American judicial system treated someone outraged with the secretive and iniquitous way heritage land was being sold to commercial gangsters.

WHEN DECHRISTOPHER’S CASE finally went to court last March, 2,000 protesters showed up. So did the Salt Lake police department, federal marshals, and Homeland Security agents. The trial lasted three days, with Judge Benson making a few things clear up front. First, DeChristopher’s attorneys wouldn’t be allowed to use a necessity defense—the argument that he had to disrupt the auction because of his beliefs about climate change (he had successfully bid for about 12 lots of land with no intention of paying). Second, the defense couldn’t bring up the fact that DeChristopher had actually raised money to buy the land; the court’s view was that, by then, the fraud had been committed. Finally, the defense could not inform the jury that past bidders had not been able to pay for their parcels either. Shea and DeChristopher’s other attorney, Ronald Yengich, were left to argue that their client had acted on impulse and hadn’t intended to disrupt the auction. The prosecution didn’t have much trouble refuting this, given DeChristopher’s public statements, and it came as little surprise when, on March 4, DeChristopher was convicted

You can imagine the behind-the-scene discussions which went on to fix that!

Culture corner
And, after these photos of reality, let's have a fix of something more worthwhile in these latest paintings from Its about Time

Comic insights

2011-11-06T18:12:00.012+02:00

"We are where we are" was a great phrase I heard for the first time a some 7 years ago – from a very understanding European Commission desk officer. I had expected some swearwords about the cock-up we were facing – instead of which I got this very wise response. You might think that the German “man ist was man isst” (to which I have referred before) is a variant – but, if you do, go back to square one! The German phrase suggests that our behaviour is determined by our diet. I disagree – they are determined to a huge extent by the words we use. "Words", as a left-wing political elder once severely but memorably told the cabinet of which I was a young member, "are important". I didn’t need the reminder – since George Orwell was then (and remains) one of my favourite writers.
All of this is by way of preface to a couple of very funny glossaries I came across yesterday. The first about civil service jargon on a site which contains some great articles tracing the development of the British civil service through its different stages and putting it all into historical context.
The second glossary is a good contribution to the sort of ridicule which we urgently need to start slinging at economists (and bankers). It’s from the website of one of the contrarian economists whose critique of economics has been at last proven so correct - Steve Keen. Curiously, his blog was down all Monday!!
This article from the very readable US Chronicle of Higher Education puts his work in a larger context.

At the start of the year I tried to pull together my various thoughts (and references) about the words which modern technocrats have used in the past 4-5 decades to protect their power and disarm any possible threat from the unwashed masses. It's in what I consider one of the best papers I have ever written - Just Words - a sceptic's glossary?
I realise as I write this that I have always targeted the technocrats (the courtiers) rather than the all-powerful commercial and other elites. Is this simple because I knew them better? Or is it because they supplied the ammunition to allow the real perverts to exploit us all?

As a party piece, this is a good expose of the phrases we Brits use; how our European partners generally understand them; and what the Brits really mean by them. For example - when we say "very interesting", foreigners think we are impressed. What we are actually thinking is that it's a lot of nonsense! Similarly, when we say "with the greatest respect", we are actually thinking "the man's an idiot" whereas the non-English speaker assumes that he is being listened to."Incidentally, by the way" actually means "this is the primary purpose of the discussion" - whereas the foreigner that the issue is of no significance. For those who deal with Brits, the table is useful prepartion and, who knows, sharing it with them might open up new friendships!
Poets are supposed to be the great explorers of verbal nuance – but I’m beginning to suspect it is actually comedians who deserve this accolade. I’ve referred recently to Tommy Cooper and Chic Murray. One of Germany's greatest - Loriot - died recently and occasioned this tribute. One of the most delightful films for me is - A Fish called Wanda – and I was pleased to find a couple of clips - first when Jamie Lee Curtis is overwhelmed by the Russian phrases of John Cleese (co-producer)
and then a clip which contrasts English styles of bedding with (those of!) the Italian.

To round off this treatment of words and phrases, who better to turn to than one of Britain's best writers - Chris Hitchens - who gives here a great treatment of the Ten Commandments

Fiddling in Cannes (and Sofia) while Europe is burning

2011-11-03T18:50:00.003+02:00

OK - I agree that fiddling while Athens is burning is not a good way to go down in history (the musical references in my last post). But perhaps, as Europe burns, the only resort is to celebrate what it has at least given in culture. Indeed I realised only yesterday that perhaps why I have, over the past decade, discovered and celebrated (beautiful) paintings is that they represent individual striving for excellence when that is so difficuly to achieve in the field I chose for myself all of 50 years ago when I made the fatal decision, in the middle of my university studies, to forsake the study of French and German and to choose instead the upcoming fields of Economics and Politics. When the shit hits the fan, another coping mechanism is humour and I was happy to come across these wry puns from a great British comic which actually remind me a bit of the vastly underrated Chic Murray from my own hometown.

However two leftists are redeeming my chosen field – today’s post from Cannes (where G20 countries are meeting) by Paul Mason blows my mind away as the most incisive comment on that is currently happening. And another old leftist - Stuart Holland whom I met in the mountain eyre of Erice (Sicily) in the mid 1970s at an (anarchist) Free University seminar – has an excellent paper which coherently spells out the path which European leaders should be taking – if they had any leadership skills.

I haven’t had time to read this article from Nouriel Roubini – but is seems worthwhile amongst all the dross from the usual business and economic commentators who are now exposed ar the brown-nosed charlatans they were.
The painting is a recent purchase of mine here - by Vladimir Dmitrov - which seems appropriately apocalytpic.