The Breakdown of Nations

I appreciate that my (global) readers are not necessarily interested in Scotland …or Romania…or Bulgaria…or Germany – which have all been subjects of (separate) series of posts in the past year. That’s why I’m rationing such posts – choosing a mixture of representative and original contributions. 

My next contributor, Murray Pittock, was smart enough to use – way back in 2008 – the title “The Road to Independence? Scotland in the Balance” of one of the books I have been dipping into in the past month to help my understanding of the issues involved.

I have a revised and expanded version – produced last year. And a bonnie book it is!

Pittock was Professor of Scottish and Romantic Literature and Deputy Head of Arts at the University of Manchester, becoming the first ever professor of Scottish Literature at an English university – and is now Professor of Literature at my alma mater – Glasgow Univerity. 
He has also been a visiting fellow at universities worldwide including:  Charles University, Prague (2010); Trinity College, Dublin (2008); the University of Wales in Celtic studies (2002) and Yale (1998, 2000–01)

He grew up in Aberdeen and attended the University of Glasgow. His parents were both lecturers in English Literature at the University of Aberdeen).

He is total Celt – immersed in cultural studies – just as I have been immersed in governance issues for an even longer period of time

The article from which this is excerpted was written more than a year ago and explains why the author will be voting yes 

Those who talk about dissolving a 300-year-old partnership ignore the fact that the partnership itself has changed. In days gone by, British imperial markets offered huge opportunities to Scots. Scottish associations were formed worldwide to promote networks to get Scots into jobs,
 The Economist put it last week, “there are compelling reasons for paying attention … to small countries on the edge of Europe … they have reached the future first”. What does that future consist of ? Alternative energy, for one. The run-down in fossil fuels, even taking into account fracking and other controversial practices, can be seen to have begun with oil at well over $100 a barrel with the world economy still in rehab.

Scotland has been blessed with both huge fossil fuel opportunities and huge renewable opportunities in the last 50 years. Are we going to say No to them both? Some will say this is “selfish” or “parochial”. Well, suppose it were: what did Britain spend the oil revenues on, and was the UK as sensible as Norway, whose oil fund – which holds 1 per cent of the global stockmarket on behalf of a country of 4.5 million people – is the economic wonder and envy of the western world?

How can we say the UK spent North Sea revenues wisely in this age of austerity? Did they do better than other countries – than Scotland would have done? But, in fact, Scotland isn’t selfish or parochial, it’s just small. Small countries are adept at networking, and it’s a networking age. They are adept at finding new solutions in education (Finland, for example) or fish farming (Norway) and many other things.

The top five countries in the world for global competitiveness in 2012 are all small, as are four of the top five for innovation and four of the top five for prosperity.They are interested in themselves, but also the whole world: and that isn’t parochial, it’s just normal. Scotland isn’t a parish, it’s a country. And of course it’s interested in itself, but it is interested in the world too, just like any normal country.As it promotes itself, Scotland is finding rising markets for its exports across the world, and will find new markets for its culture too. A Yes vote is a necessary key step forward in that process.

 Independence is not separation: it is about talking to ourselves and the world without going through an intermediary. It itself will be a process: as Jim McColl put it last week “a united kingdom but with an independent parliament”.

Ireland stayed in a monetary union with sterling for 57 years. Every case is different, but the point is that what we will share with our neighbours on these islands will still be a partnership, just a new one. And we need a new one. 

Life is change, and change is gained by how we think, vote and act differently. No change is without risk, but “no change” is full of risk. It is indeed voting for nothing, and we will not be offered something for that nothing.I am voting Yes because I have spent years championing the literature and culture of Scotland at home and abroad. 

There are people throughout the world watching us and waiting for us to join them. It won’t be a free ride: but if we decide we are confident enough to have something to give in trade or niche industries or culture or creativity, we will get something back. 

Does Scotland have the self-confidence to realise what has changed, to realise the opportunities that there are, and to look to the future? There is much more to our quantifiable economic strengths, exports, education, energy and innovation than the power of positive thinking, but without it we will not develop as fast as we need to, or have the voice we ought to, in this rapidly changing world. And that is why I am voting Yes.

I said in a recent post that I would like to see more discussion of the “separation boost” – the possible impact (economic, social, political– if not psychological which separation from Britain would have. I have always had a soft spot for the “Small is Beautiful” argument – best represented in the Breakdown of Nations book produced in 1947 by the Austrian Leopold Kohr. I’m surprised (and disappointed) that no one seems to be mentioning him in the debate.

And one of the few systematic studies of the contribution of “small countries” is this one from the David Hume Institute 

Too big to be saved

I have referred several times in this blog to Paul Kingsnorth – who has a very pertinent article on the global crisis in today’s Guardian

In times like these, people look elsewhere for answers. A time of crisis is also a time of opening-up, when thinking that was consigned to the fringes moves to centre stage. When things fall apart, the appetite for new ways of seeing is palpable, and there are always plenty of people willing to feed it by coming forward with their pet big ideas.
But here's a thought: what if big ideas are part of the problem? What if, in fact, the problem is bigness itself?

The crisis currently playing out on the world stage is a crisis of growth. Not, as we are regularly told, a crisis caused by too little growth, but by too much of it. Banks grew so big that their collapse would have brought down the entire global economy. To prevent this, they were bailed out with huge tranches of public money, which in turn is precipitating social crises on the streets of western nations. The European Union has grown so big, and so unaccountable, that it threatens to collapse in on itself.

Corporations have grown so big that they are overwhelming democracies and building a global plutocracy to serve their own interests. The human economy as a whole has grown so big that it has been able to change the atmospheric composition of the planet and precipitate a mass extinction event.

One man who would not have been surprised by this crisis of bigness, had he lived to see it, was Leopold Kohr. Kohr has a good claim to be the most important political thinker that you have never heard of. Unlike Marx, he did not found a global movement or inspire revolutions. Unlike Hayek, he did not rewrite the economic rules of the modern world. Kohr was a modest, self-deprecating man, but this was not the reason his ideas have been ignored by movers and shakers in the half century since they were produced. They have been ignored because they do not flatter the egos of the power-hungry, be they revolutionaries or plutocrats. In fact, Kohr's message is a direct challenge to them. "Wherever something is wrong," he insisted, "something is too big."

Published in 1957, The Breakdown of Nations laid out what at the time was a radical case: that small states, small nations and small economies are more peaceful, more prosperous and more creative than great powers or superstates. It was a claim that was as unfashionable as it was possible to make. This was the dawn of the space age – a time of high confidence in the progressive, gigantist, technology-fuelled destiny of humankind. Feted political thinkers were talking in all seriousness of creating a world government as the next step towards uniting humanity. Kohr was seriously at odds with the prevailing mood. He later commented, dryly, that his critics "dismissed my ideas by referring to me as a poet".

Kohr's claim was that society's problems were not caused by particular forms of social or economic organisation, but by their size. Socialism, anarchism, capitalism, democracy, monarchy – all could work well on what he called "the human scale": a scale at which people could play a part in the systems that governed their lives. But once scaled up to the level of modern states, all systems became oppressors. Changing the system, or the ideology that it claimed inspiration from, would not prevent that oppression – as any number of revolutions have shown – because "the problem is not the thing that is big, but bigness itself".

Drawing from history, Kohr demonstrated that when people have too much power, under any system or none, they abuse it. The task, therefore, was to limit the amount of power that any individual, organisation or government could get its hands on. The solution to the world's problems was not more unity but more division. The world should be broken up into small states, roughly equivalent in size and power, which would be able to limit the growth and thus domination of any one unit. Small states and small economies were more flexible, more able to weather economic storms, less capable of waging serious wars, and more accountable to their people. Not only that, but they were more creative.

On a whistlestop tour of medieval and early modern Europe, The Breakdown of Nations does a brilliant job of persuading the reader that many of the glories of western culture, from cathedrals to great art to scientific innovations, were the product of small states.
To understand the sparky, prophetic power of Kohr's vision, you need to read The Breakdown of Nations. Some if it will create shivers of recognition. Bigness, predicted Kohr, could only lead to more bigness, for "whatever outgrows certain limits begins to suffer from the irrepressible problem of unmanageable proportions". Beyond those limits it was forced to accumulate more power in order to manage the power it already had. Growth would become cancerous and unstoppable, until there was only one possible endpoint: collapse.

Two years ago, I reread the book and picked out several quotations– of which this was one –

the chief blessing of a small-state system is ...its gift of a freedom which hardly ever registers if it is pronounced.....freedom from issues....ninety percent of our intellectual miseries are due to the fact that almost everything in our life has become an ism, an issue... our life’s efforts seem to be committed exclusively to the task of discovering where we stand in some battle raging about some abstract issue...

The blessing of a small state returns us from the misty sombreness of an existence in which we are nothing but ghostly shadows of meaningless issues to the reality which we can only find in our neighbours and neighbourhoods

Kingsnorth continues that

We have now reached the point that Kohr warned about over half a century ago: the point where "instead of growth serving life, life must now serve growth, perverting the very purpose of existence". Kohr's "crisis of bigness" is upon us and, true to form, we are scrabbling to tackle it with more of the same: closer fiscal unions, tighter global governance, geoengineering schemes, more economic growth. Big, it seems, is as beautiful as ever to those who have the unenviable task of keeping the growth machine going.

This shouldn't surprise us. It didn't surprise Kohr, who, unlike some of his utopian critics, never confused a desire for radical change with the likelihood of it actually happening. Instead, his downbeat but refreshingly honest conclusion was that, like a dying star, the gigantist global system would in the end fall in on itself, and the whole cycle of growth would begin all over again. But before it did so, "between the intellectual ice ages of great-power domination", the world would become "little and free once more"

The discussion thread to Kingsworth's article is also worth reading.

a bible for our times

The outage lasted all day and allowed me therefore to read the entire Kohr book ("The Breakdown of Nations") - without the distractions of the internet! And what a book!! It pulsates with clarity, originality ...and wit.
Part of his argument is that – just as companies grow large and inefficient and have to be broken up by Monopoly Commissions – so have States grown to a size that makes them dangerous.

Remember he was an economist – and drafted the book in the early 1950s! He quotes the evidence there was even then that innovation came from small companies – and that decreasing returns of scale sets in early (evidence continues to accumulate that few company mergers are successful – and yet they continue).

In similar vein, he shows that cultural excellence was produced in small states – who may not have always been peaceful but whose wars with one another were short and limited in their damage. His early chapters are powerful statements that, when an organisation reaches the point of domination, it will always succumb to the temptation of aggression.

And he anticipates the contemporary arguments of writers such as Fridjof Capra and Margaret Wheatley about what students of organisations can learn from physics and the new insights into “chaos” – by a simple observation about “atoms”.

His main challenge, however, is to the principle of specialisation and you will find in chapter 6 – “The Efficiency of the Small”. There he is merciless in his critique of the “wealth” of the “modern” world – daring to suggest that most of is useless and counter-productive and that people were happier in medieval times! “The more powerful a society becomes, the more of its increasing product – instead of increasing individual consumption – is devoured by the task of coping with the problems caused by the rise of its very size and power”

I always have pencilled underlines, ringed sections and exclamation marks in the good books I read – and my copy of this book is almost disfigured! Two insights I found particularly relevant – one which he produces as one of the reasons for the intense cultural productivity of the small state –

 “in a large state, we are forced to live in tightly specialised compartments since populous societies not only make large-scale specialisation possible – but necessary. As a result, our life’s experience is confined to a narrow segment whose borders we almost never cross, but within which we become great single-purpose experts”... “A small state offers the opportunity for everybody to experience everything simply by looking out of the window" – 

whereas a large state has to employ a legion of soi-disant experts to define its problems and produce “solutions”. The other striking comment he makes is –

“the chief blessing of a small-state system is ...its gift of a freedom which hardly ever registers if it is pronounced.....freedom from issues....ninety percent of our intellectual miseries are due to the fact that almost everything in our life has become an ism, an issue... our life’s efforts seem to be committed exclusively to the task of discovering where we stand in some battle raging about some abstract issue... The blessing of a small state returns us from the misty sombreness of an existence in which we are nothing but ghostly shadows of meaningless issues to the reality which we can only find in our neighbours and neighbourhoods”

Most people would probably see this as utopian – and yet its argument is ruthless and very much in what I would call the “realist” mode (one of the reasons why I was taken with several of the books in my earlier list). As he puts it at one stage in the argument –

“many will object to the power or size theory on the ground that it is based on an unduly pessimistic interpretation of man. They will claim that, far from being seduced by power, we are generally and predominantly animated by the ideals of decency, justice, magnanimity etc This is true, but only because most of the time we do not possess the critical power enabling us to get away with indecency”.

This is the bible for both new management and the “slow-food” movement! The writing sparkles – and includes a good joke about a planner who, having died, is allowed to try to organise the time people spend in Heaven into more rational chunks of activity, fails and sent to help organise Hell. “I’m here to organise Hell”, he announces to Satan – who laughs and explains that “organisation IS hell”.

I once said that all courses relating to government should have Robert Fisk’s The Great War for Civilisation - the conquest of the middle east on their reading list. This is a book which portrays both the victims of the slaughter and their families and also those in the Western bureaucracies – both private and public – who make the slaughter possible and ignored the lessons of history. Their words are closely analysed – and their actions held to account in a relentless way which restores one faith in journalism. I would now add Kohr’s book to that reading list – not least because it offers an answer to the question we ask from time to time “When will they ever learn?”

Bill McKibben's Deep Economy - economics as if the world mattered (2007) is another book which would be in that list (as well as Michael Pollan's Omnivore's Dilemma). I have a short comment on McKibben's book on my public admin reform site. Although he recognises Schumacher, Leopold Kohr gets no mention. Sad!