We like to
think that we are “masters
of our fate” and it irks us when foreigners, for example, make us realise
that our behaviour is often the result of specific cultural factors which can
be questioned.
The last
post has made me return to a question which has haunted me since I started to
work in Europe more than 30 years ago…….”to what extent can we actually change
national characteristics” – let alone state institutions ???
NB – this may look a long post (and it has certainly taken a full day
to compose) but it actually divides fairly easily into three separate sections –
which I felt still needed to be part of a single post
1. An ignored 1990 warning
Ralf
Dahrendorf was a famous German sociologist/UK statesman who wrote in 1990 an
extended public letter first published under the title “Reflections on the
Revolution in Europe” and then expanded as Reflections on the
Revolution of our Time. In it he made the comment that it would take one or two
years to create new institutions of political democracy in the recently
liberated countries of central Europe; maybe five to 10 years to reform the
economy and make a market economy; and 15 to 20 years to create the rule of
law. But it would take maybe two generations to create a functioning civil
society there.
A former
adviser to Vaslev Havel, Jiri Pehe, referred 7 years ago to that prediction and suggested that
“what we see now is that we have completed the first two stages, the transformation of the institutions, of the framework of political democracy on the institutional level, there is a functioning market economy, which of course has certain problems, but when you take a look at the third area, the rule of the law, there is still a long way to go, and civil society is still weak and in many ways not very efficient.”
He then went
on to make the useful distinction between “democracy understood as
institutions and democracy understood as culture”
“It’s been much easier to create a democratic regime, a democratic system as a set of institutions and procedures and mechanism, than to create democracy as a kind of culture – that is, an environment in which people are actually democrats”.
2. Where did talk about “political cultures” first
start?
The idea of
“political culture” is – as the academics have taken to put it – a “contested
field”…Not that this has stopped wild assertions being made about national
characteristics. Indeed it has spawned one of the most enjoyable of book
genres - who, for example, can resist We,
Europeans – with its amusing vignettes of our various mutual neighbours? And,
although the Xenophobe
series does rather take this to extremes, some of this stuff can actually
be quite insightful – for example, this good
expose of the phrases Brits use – with columns distinguishing what our
European partners generally understand by various common phrases from what Brits
really mean by them
And, since
we all first noticed globalisation in the 1980s, another new field has been spawned –
that of “comparative management” whose foremost writers have been Geert
Hofstede, Ronnie
Lessem and Frans
Trompenaars ….Richard D Lewis’s When Cultures Collide – leading across Cultures (1996) is perhaps the
most readable treatment.
There used indeed
to be an area called “path
dependency” which argued that our behaviour was much more influenced by
historical cultural patterns than we imagined. It focused initially on
technical examples such as the layout of the typewriter - but found new
life after the fall of communism. Indeed it gave rise to a sub-field of
political science called “transitology” (which I try to explain in chapter 2
of my 1999 book In Transit – notes on good
governance)
Political culture versus rational choice – the example of the Czech-Slovak transition is one of the better examples of the genre and The political culture of unified Germany (written by a German academic) puts the field in the wider context of “political culture”
Political culture versus rational choice – the example of the Czech-Slovak transition is one of the better examples of the genre and The political culture of unified Germany (written by a German academic) puts the field in the wider context of “political culture”
Culture
Matters – how values shape human progress; ed Lawrence Harrison and SP
Huntington is not an easy book to find these days. It came out in 2000 but
attracted the entirely appropriate comment that a more appropriate title would
have been Western
Culture Matters
And that indeed is the problem - that commentary
about other cultures is imbued with notions not only of “the other” but with
those of superiority and inferiority….
This raises
the obvious question of what sort of person might be best placed to do an
insightful (if not objective) analysis of a political culture. The answer, I
would suggest, comes from using 2 axes – one to denote the “status” one
(insider/outsider); the other to denote something like “the
generalist/specialist” spectrum.
Robert Kaplan would be an example of a generalist outsider in Romania’s case – Mungiu-Pippidi an example of a specialist insider, although perhaps not the best example in
view of her Berlin location and international profile…The historian Lucian Boia
might be a better example…..
3. How 2 American political scientists tarred the Italian Image
Edward Banfield’s study in the early 1950s of a small town
in southern Italy whose inhabitants displayed loyalty only to the members of
their nuclear family and who had absolutely no sense of social responsibility
for wider circles. The book (published in 1955) was called “The Moral Basis of a Backward Society”
Banfield concluded that the town's plight was rooted in the
distrust, envy and suspicion displayed by its inhabitants' relations with each
other. Fellow citizens would refuse to help one another, except where one's own
personal material gain was at stake. Many attempted to hinder their neighbours
from attaining success, believing that others' good fortune would inevitably
harm their own interests. "Montegrano"'s citizens viewed their
village life as little more than a battleground. Consequently, there prevailed
social isolation and poverty—and an inability to work together to solve common
social problems, or even to pool common resources and talents to build infrastructure
or common economic concerns.
"Montegrano"'s inhabitants were not unique nor
inherently more impious than other people. But for quite a few reasons:
historical and cultural, they did not have what he termed "social
capital"—the habits, norms, attitudes and networks that motivate folk to work for the common good.
This stress on the nuclear family over the interest of the
citizenry, he called the ethos of ‘amoral familism’. This he argued was
probably created by the combination of certain land-tenure conditions, a high
mortality rate, and the absence of other community building institutions.
Fast forward sixty years to an article in “City Compass Guide Romania”
in which an expat (and, full disclosure) friend of mine wrote….
If you are fortunate enough to drive
in Bucharest you will witness what is probably the clearest evidence of mass
individualism in global human society. Romanian people, of all shapes, sizes,
social and educational backgrounds and income brackets will do things in their
cars that display a total disregard for sanity and other drivers.
Manoeuvres such as parking in the
middle of the street, u-turning on highways without any warning and weaving
between lanes in heavy traffic at 150 kilometres per hour are commonplace and
point to an extreme lack of concern for the safety or even the simple existence
of others.
The next time you are waiting to get
on a plane at Henri Coandă airport,
take a little time to observe how queuing in an orderly and effective manner is
clearly regarded as an affront to the sovereignty of the Romanian individual.
Enjoy the spectacle of the pushing, shoving and general intimidation that
follows the arrival of the airport staff to supervise boarding. Even while
watching an international rugby test match you will only occasionally see the
same intense level of barely controlled aggression.
Outside of their core social networks
Romanians closely follow the rule stating that it is every man, woman and child
for themselves. ……There is an
opinion poll, published in early 2012, showing that around 90 percent of the
Romanian population regards almost all of their compatriots as utterly untrustworthy
and incompetent. At the same time 90 percent, possibly the same 90 percent, see
themselves as being absolutely beyond reproach. This is clearly an extreme
response no matter how you view it and provides evidence of an extraordinary
and troubling imbalance within the generality of Romania’s social relationships.
There is a well-known prayer in
Romania, which roughly goes: “Dear God, if my goat is so ill that it will die,
please make sure that my neighbour’s goat dies too.”
So what does this commonality suggest? The EU’s first
Ambassador here was Karen Fogg who gave every consultant who came here in the
early 1990s (like me) a summary of what can be seen as the follow-up to
Banfield’s book – Robert Putnam’s Making Democracy Work – civic traditions in Italy (1993) which suggested that the laggardly nature of southern
Italian Regions was due entirely to this “amoral familism”. Putnam made
an even greater play of missing “social capital” – indeed spawned an incredible
technocratic literature on the concept and ideas on how it could be
“engineered” to deal with the new alienation of modern capitalism..
Romanian communism, of course, had almost 50 years to
inculcate more cooperative attitudes and behaviour – but the forced nature of
“collective farms”; the forced migration of villagers to urban areas to drive
industrialisation; and the scale of Securitate spying created a society where,
paradoxically, even fewer could trusted anyone.
From 1990 the market became God; Reagan and Thatcher had
glorified greed; the state was “bad"; and television – which had been limited
by Ceausescu to 2 hours a day - the great “good”……As the commercial stations
and journals spread, the values of instant gratification became dominant (one
of the points Dorel Sandor makes)……
To be continued…..
