Romanian's National Day

This blog has celebrated Romania’s National Day before - but today is special since it is exactly 100 years ago today that various groups came together in Alba Iulia (which was previously the heart of Hungarian Transylvania) to celebrate the unification of that significant part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire (and part of Banat) not only with what was (since 1877) already an independent Romania but also with Bessarabia, Moldova and North Dobrodjea. In one fell swoop the landmass of the country – which opted for the Western Allies only in 1916 - was tripled.

It’s therefore a suitable day to celebrate good writing about Romania. Let me start with an author, Robert Kaplan, who has established a nice little niche for himself as a traveller with a strong line in geo-politics – with The Revenge of History (2013) being its epitome.

I have just finished rereading his “In Europe’s Shadow” (2016) which is most decidedly not a travelogue but that rare and worthwhile endeavour – an attempt to penetrate a country’s soul borne of his forays over a period of 30 years after his first (and unusual) first port of call in 1981– selected simply because, for someone wanting to be a foreign journalist, it offered the distinction of having no competitors…

It’s a very individual if not poetic book which in which the country’s past casts the main shadow (despite the title) but one which is dealt with deftly – often through conversations with characters many of whom are long dead. Americans are not well known for their linguistic skills and I sense that Kaplan relied on translated texts for his early grasp of Romanian history – so Mircea Eliade’s little history of the country (written when he was an attache in Portugal with the Iron Guard regime) was an early companion for Kaplan. But also English writers such as Stephen Runciman and Lord Kinross (on the influence of the Ottoman empire), Macartney (Austro-Hungarian empire) and particularly John Julius Norwich (Byzantium) Since 1990 he has been able to access the histories of Vlad Georgescu, Lucian Boia, Keith Hitchens even Neagu Djuvara although his failure to mention Tom Gallagher's 2 books on the country proves the point I make below about his lack of interest in the contemporary scene.... 

Although he’s able to get access to Presidents (Iliescu and Basescu) and Prime Ministers (Ponta), it’s the long-term geopolitical threats represented by the borders, plains, armies and pipelines which interest him – and he is happiest when in the company of those who talk this language.

The comments of even a dilettante like Patapievici are preferable to any conversation about ordinary life – all we get on that score is a statement that “thanks to the influence of the EU, institutions are slowly becoming more transparent” (!!) 
For future editions of the book, I would recommend that he seeks out people such as Alina Mungiu-Pippidi and Sorin Ionitsa

Then there’s my own Mapping Romania - notes on an unfinished journey (2014). This is my own tribute to the country whose summers I have enjoyed since 2007 and which I have known intermittently since winter 1991. It's actually more of a resource book for English-language visitors who want to know something of the country's history and culture. Its 120 pages contain various a couple of thousand hyperlinks and annexes which give further detail on its history, literature (or rather English texts focusing on the country), art....even cinema...

And, in Bucharest’s French bookshop, I have just come across a nice set of little stories - “Chroniques de Roumanie”; Richard Edwards (2017)

Plus Ca Change,,,,plus c’est la meme chose???

European countries have experienced massive changes since the end of the war – and yet, I keep on wondering, .”to what extent do national characteristics actually change”. The interview with Dorel Sandor does not seem to have attracted much notice in the country but, for me, has crystallised the various impressions about Romania I’ve conveyed in the blog in recent years

Let me summarise his key points -

- the so-called “revolution” of 1989 was nothing of the sort – just a takeover by the old-guard masquerading in the costumes of the market economy and democracy

- which, after 30 years, has incubated a new anomie – with the “mass” and “social” media dominating people’s minds

- So-called “European integration” has destroyed Romanian agriculture and industry - and drained the country of 4 million talented young Romanians

- After 30 years, there is not a single part of the system – economic, political, religious, cultural, voluntary – which offers any real prospect of positive change

- Even Brussels seems to have written the country off

- The country is locked into a paralysis of suspicion, distrust, consumerism, apathy, anomie

- No one is calling for a new start – let alone demonstrating the potential for realistic alliances

My last 2 posts have argued that -

- in the early 90s everyone (particularly outside Romania) expected too much – although remember that Ralf Dahrendorf - unique in his experience as both a German and British politician and one of the first academics in the 50s to explore the nature of the social changes which took place in Germany in the first half of the 20^th century (Society and Democracy in Germany) - had warned in 1990 that real cultural change would take “two generations”. For middle class academics, this meant 50 years!

- Absolutely no preparations existed in 1989 for the possibility that communism might collapse and for the choices this would present for political, economic and legal systems …..Everyone had assumed that the change would be in the opposite direction. The only writings which could be drawn were those about the south American, Portugese and Spanish transition ….

- The EC stopped treating Romania as in need of “developmental assistance” in 1998/99. The PHARE programme was phased out - the focus shifted to training for EU membership and the implementation of the Acquis (using the TAIEX programme). Talk of differences in political culture was seen as politically incorrect – eastern countries simply had to learn the language and habits of the European social market and, hey-presto, things would magically change……

- 30 years on, the names of Bulgarian and Romanian institutions and processes may have changed but not the fundamental reality – with a corruption which is nothing less than systemic.

- The billions of Euros allocated to Romania since 2007 under the EC’s Structural Funds programmes have compounded the systemic and moral corruption which affects all sectors.

- The Cooperation and Verification Mechanism is, after 11 years, deeply resented – despite the increasingly clear evidence of the collusion between the Prosecution and the Secret services…..

The Italian and German examples

In 1958 Ed Banfield coined the phrase “amoral familism” to characterize southern Italy and its resistance to change. In 1993 Robert Putnam extended this critique with his Making Democracy Work – civic traditions in modern Italy – pointing out that, centuries later, cultural patterns in the south still profoundly affected modern institutions …. The Italian system since then has demonstrated little capacity for change. What appeared to be a new opening in the 1990s disappointed….the old systems simply resurfaced

Germany’s traditional power structure, on the other hand, was able to change after 1945… The Weimar Republic failed to break it – but simply gave a Nazi regime the opportunity to let loose a blood-letting from which the world has not yet recovered. Three forces were required to transform German society in 1945-50 - the trauma of defeat on all fronts; the imposition by the victors of completely new institutional, legal, social and economic systems; and the Realpolitik calculations of the Cold War

Romania, however, has been able to brush off the institutional challenge which had been posed by membership of both the EC and NATO (see). The occasional scandal can and does cause the downfall of a government - but nothing now seems able to disturb its systemic inertia.

Conclusion

It has given me no pleasure to draft this post. But I feel that too many people for too long have not spoken out….In 2 months Romania will take over the Presidency of the EU which will see the full panoply(a)y of mutual sycophancy at full throttle……making it even more difficult for dissenting voices to be heard…

Dorel Sandor was least convincing when he tried to offer a way forward 

I have a list of what to do – starting with the need for an exploration of what sort of Romania we should be aiming for in the next few decades. Such a process would be moderated by professionals using proper diagnostics, scenario thinking and milestones.
It would be managed by a group with a vision emancipated from the toxic present.  

I have a lot of sympathy for such approaches – embodied, for example, in the Future Search method. It’s how I started my own political journey in 1971 – with an annual conference in a shipbuilding town facing the decline of the trade on which it had depended for so long….But any venture would have to demonstrate that it can deal with the astonishing level of distrust of others shown by the fact that, in 2014, only 7% of the Romanian population could say that “most people can be trusted” (compared with about 20% in Italy and 40% in Germany)

For my money Social Trust is one of the fundamental elements of the soil in which democracy grows. From the start of the transition Romania was caught up in a global neo-liberalism tsunami which has been corroding that soil….

A Short Reading List on Romanian political culture

Articles

RGY posts

When will it ever change? (July 2017)

Can Outsiders ever understand what’s going on in Romania? (Jan 2017)

Impervious Power (Jan 2017)

A Divided Country – dangerous times (Feb 2017)

Are Nations really masters of their fates? (April 2017)
Is it people who change systems - or systems which change people? (July 2017)

Academic articles on political culture - and Romania

Romania Redivivus (2017)

A Guide to Change and change management for Rule of Law practitioners (2015)

Hijacked modernisation - Romanian political culture in the 20^th century; Alina Mungiu-Pippidi (2007)

Poor Policy-making and how to improve it in states with weak institutions; Sorin Ionitsa (CEU 2006)

“Fatalistic political cultures” Alina Mungiu-Pippidi 2006 (chapter in Democracy and Political Culture in East Europe in which she argued (a) that it was too easy for people (not least the political elite themselves!) to use the writings of Samuel Huntington to write off countries such as Romania; and (b) that we really did need to look more closely at what various surveys (such as The World Values Survey) showed before jumping to conclusions

books

In Europe’s Shadow – two cold wars and a thirty-year journey through Romania and beyond; Robert Kaplan (2016) - a fascinating book which has an element of the “Common Book” tradition about it with its breadth of reading

A Concise History of Romania; Keith Hitchins (2014) Very readable..

Mapping Romania - notes on an unfinished journey; Ronald Young (2014) See section 7.2 at page 31 and all the annexes for the political culture references

Romania and the European Union – how the weak vanquished the strong; Tom Gallagher (2009) great narrative

Romania – borderland of Europe; Lucian Boia (2001) Very readable and well translated

Why we need to be suspicious of the idea of “political culture”

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”

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…..

a powerful Interview in Revista 22

Dorel Sandor is a name to conjure with in Romania….

I first met him some 25 years ago when he had just started his career as an independent policy consultant which morphed into that of a respected political commentator….

Less visible these days on television perhaps than a decade or so ago, Sandor has just given an interview in Revista 22 which some Romanians may feel is selling their country short. As, however, I've posted only once this year about Romania and his analysis will strike chords with many of my readers who are from other European countries as well as the US, Ukraine and Russia......I’m going to try to summarise the main points of the interview – but blame Google Translate for the inevitable mistakes which will occur…….

First, however, let’s set the context for the 98% of my readers who are not Romanian…..
The end of next year will see the 30^th anniversary of the fall of the Ceausescu regime but few Romanians have any reason to celebrate. Four million of their best and brightest have, for example, emigrated – and most of its industries, agriculture and woodlands sold to foreigners.

Romania joined the EU in 2007 and, for a time, it seemed, was making progress in judicial reform where it is still (like Bulgaria) subject to the constraints of an annual monitoring system. The sentencing of a Prime Minister to jail-time led to what appeared to be open season being declared on senior politicians and businessmen (corruption was so systemic that it was difficult to distinguish the two).

Accusations about partiality were brushed aside initially but evidence slowly began to accumulate first of suspiciously high conviction rates and, more seriously, collusion between prosecutors and the (still extensive) security services…..Traian Basescu the maverick liberal President (from 2004-2014) had appointed in 2006 a young woman Laura Kovosi as Prosecutor General who found herself and the service under increasing fire from various high-profile scandals from 2016. In December of that year, the Social Democratic party came to power and tried to use the scandals to muzzle the Prosecution service and indeed to change the criminal law. Extensive street protests have marked the regime ever since….  

The Sandor Interview

starts by emphasising how wrong it is to talk of a Romanian "revolution" in 1989/90 – it was just a reshuffling of positions - and creation of opportunities for a Mafia-type takeover of financial assets.. 

“The great secret of post-communism is that those who fed, sustained and exploited it did not want it to have democracy, market economy, free press, civil society, but to put money on the factories, plants, resources. And here begins the metastasis of Romania for the past 30 years. At present, parliament is a collection of nonentites, people fleeing immunity with no idea of what is happening in Romania”.

Indeed, he suggests that there are no more than a dozen decent individuals in Parliament – and 2 worthwhile trade union leaders. He is highly critical of NGOs and the media…..”empty shells”….

He is particularly scathing of the passive consumerist culture which now has a grip on the country 

“Nowadays, the plague that destroys 30-40 year-olds and children is mobile phone, laptop and Facebook. Now, when the baby comes out of the mother's belly, she puts the phone in her mouth and sees what is delivered to her screen, so she does not have any personal experience and she's eating information from commercial companies. Communism and capitalism have been replaced by vulgar consumerism And the phone, the laptop, the computer, Facebook and the TV are sources of substitution for the collective personal identity and the world we live in.

On the street, I see mothers with a baby in their arms talking on two phones. Or children for a few years who sit and look at the computer screen. 80% of people are prisoners of the screen. It's a plague. This is one of the main factors that peacefully breaks down, soft liberation, collective and individual thinking…….. The human species is in a very serious anthropological deadlock. It is in the global trend. We, being a poorer, more primitive country, are lagging behind in this pathology. So it's an incredible collective plague”.

And has clearly given up on politics – 

“The stark reality is now that we do not have political parties any more. The Romanian political environment is in fact an ensemble of ordinary gangs that try to survive the process and jail and eventually save their wealth in the country or abroad. That's all! Romania has no rulers. It has mobsters in buildings with signs that say "The Ministry of Fish that Blooms".

Hungary and Poland are currently the focus of serious European concern simply because Brussels has given up on Romania 

“In Poland and Hungary things are working. They have preserved their internal authority, they want to lead them, according to market standards, and they are naughty. But these are two countries that function and want to function in their traditional, authoritarian way, with pride. And to them is nationalism, but it is a nationalism that has consistency.

While there is no such thing in us. However, there are relevant things that happen there in the economy, in investments. And they violate the rules for personal and personal interest, but not in the way we do. It is a gap between the level at which we have fallen below elementary standards and them.

One of the reasons why the EU is not too concerned about us is that it is that they reckon that you can only reform a driver with a car that works. We are a two-wheeled wagon and two horses, a chaotic space, broken into pieces. What's to reform? So it's a big difference.”

Is Romania therefore “finished” – as Sandor claims? 
If anyone can deal with this question, it is Alina Mungiu-Pippidi - a prolific and high profile Romanian academic/social activist (with a base for the past few years in the Hertie School of Government in Berlin) who has been trying to understand Romanian political culture and the wider issue of corruption for the past 2 decades. In 2006 she contributed a chapter on “Fatalistic political cultures” to a book on Democracy and Political Culture in East Europe. In this she argued (a) that it was too easy for people (not least the political elite themselves!) to use the writings of Samuel Huntington to write Balkan countries off; and (b) that we really did need to look more closely at what various surveys (such as The World Values Survey) showed before jumping to conclusions….In 2007 she gave us even more insights into the Romanian culture in Hijacked modernisation - Romanian political culture in the 20^th century 

But what can people do when a system is so broken? Talk of the "democratic will" seems meaningless....Few people understand how the Italian system has been able to survive - but at least it had the liquid resources to keep its people happy.....The stark truth is that, after 30 years, Romanians live in a state of anomie and with none of the social trust or solidarity which allows some European countries to survive - however insidiously neo-liberalism is destroying even these...... 

Roman Romania

Two venerable Romanians “shuffled off their mortal coils” this month – first ex-King Michael who had been forced to abdicate at gun point by the Communists in December 1947; some 10 days later at age 101, the more significant figure of Neagu Djuvara, émigré, academic, journalist and still active historian. Having fought on the Eastern front, he was briefly charged to explore surrender possibilities with Russia before the communist takeover forced him to seek refuge in Paris…..

Djuvara returned to Bucharest in 1990/91 to an academic and writing career (his Brief Illustrated History of Romanians is one of books on my short list of “beautiful books”) and was, fairly exceptionally for this highly politicized and divided country, warmly regarded by all shades of opinion 

He was a critic of what he perceived to be an excessively pro-Western attitude in Romanian politics,..
He also wrote about what he called the "American hegemony" and its premises, analysing the influence which the United States and its foreign policy have had on the World and, more specifically, on Europe. He characterised the efforts of the United States to establish what resembles a hegemony in Europe and other parts of the World as a "Seventy-Seven Years' War" waged throughout most of the 20th century.
Neagu Djuvara can be seen as a populariser and "de-mystifier" of history, having published books aimed a younger audience as well as books seeking to explain the historical basis for mythical figures such as Dracula or Negru Vodă. He also published memories from his exile, recounting his life and work in Paris and Africa

More recently, he was constantly warning of the dangers of Romania’s demographic decline

" For me, the greatest drama that Romania is currently experiencing is that the young people want to leave this country, and if they go abroad and find work there they will not return to Romania. We, my generation and all my predecessors, the three or four generations that preceded me and who studied abroad, none of them was going to stay there after finishing their studies. He was returning with that intellectual baggage and, in his eyes, with the image of other urban landscapes than in Bucharest, and trying to do the same thing at home. But they never thought about leaving or leaving the country. So my message is: "Young people, if you can, even if you do it worse in our country, it is a supreme duty to return and rebuild Romania " .

He would have enjoyed the bluntness of a long article on his country – Romania Redivivus - in the current edition of "New Left Review" which argues that 

..... Of all East European countries, Romania is endowed with the greatest variety of natural resources. The Carpathian Mountains which wall off the northwestern province of Transylvania from Wallachia, in the south, and Moldavia, in the east, boast some of the last primeval forests of Europe. The Danube Delta offers a fabled reservation of endangered bird and fish species. The Ploieşti oilfields contain the oldest commercial well on earth—Bucharest’s streets were the first to be illuminated by kerosene—and still hold unknown reserves, closer to ground level than in any other country ringing the Black Sea. The fertility of the soil is legendary.

 The Rape of the Country; But little of the country’s potential wealth has found its way into the hands of its people. Arguably the last real peasantry to be found within the EU works what was once the breadbasket of the Ottoman Empire: two in five Romanians live in the countryside; one in three survive off agriculture; many have never left their villages and only a minority have access to mechanized farming equipment.
The value of their land, however, has not been lost on Brussels, which has overseen the funnelling of Romanian wealth westward for a genera­tion. Prior to its EU accession in 2007, entire sectors of the economy were picked off by multinationals.
- The Romanian banking system was taken over by Société Générale, Raiffeisen and the Erste Group.
- Its energy sector fell to Österreichische Mineralölverwaltung of Vienna and C˘eské Energetické Závody of Prague.
- Its steel manufacturing went to Mittal, its timber production to the Schweighofer Group, its national automobile, the Dacia, to Renault.
- Much of what isn’t yet owned by Western concerns has been laid bare for their disposal. In 1999, the Canadian mining company Gabriel Resources won dubious rights to excavate Roşia Montană, the largest open-pit gold mine in Europe. Its exploitation requires the stripping away of its status as a unesco her­itage site, the demolition of four surrounding mountain peaks and a handful of nearby villages, and the carving out of a pit half the size of Gibraltar for holding cyanide-laced run-off; the Romanian state is being sued by Gabriel Resources for $4.4 billion in profit losses for forestall­ing this process.
- By 2010 the largest private owner of trees in Romania was Harvard University, which six years earlier had started buying up enormous swathes of forest that had themselves been seized by mafia intermediaries on bogus claims of pre-communist ownership; sold off to Ikea, tens of thousands of acres were sawn down, probably never to be recovered.
- In 2012, residents of some fifty villages in the Banat, the fertile corner of western Romania that brushes up against Serbia and Hungary, woke up to find that their ancestral plots of land had been seized through another legal subterfuge by Rabobank of Utrecht.9 There are dozens of such cases. Few have been compensated. 

The tentacles of the Deep Security State. Meanwhile, beneath the surface of democratization, the authoritarian tenor of Ceauşescu’s rule persists in Romania’s powerful security forces. The Securitate, the most ruthless police force in the Warsaw Pact, has been rebranded and is now run by a generation of operatives whose aver­age age is 35, trained at special intelligence universities. They are, in many cases, the children of the 16,000

Securitate members who pro­vided the backbone of the Romanian state after 1989, having emerged as the undisputed winners of the ‘revolution’ of that year. At least nine of these new services exist. The predominant one, the Serviciul Român de Informaţii (sri), monitors Romanians internally; with some 12,000 operatives, it has double the manpower of any equivalent agency in Europe and, with military-grade espionage equipment, conducts upwards of 40,000 wiretaps a year.10 The older generation of Securitate agents managed the privatization schemes of the 1990s; they are now shielded by the younger cohort from legal oversight.

This interlocking of economic influence—four out of the five richest Romanians have a Securitate background—and legal inviolability—Romania’s judiciary is too dependent on the sri to prosecute it—allows the deep state to operate with impunity. The security services have vast stakes in telecom­munications and big-data collection. They oversee their own ngos, run their own tv channels and have their people on the editorial boards of the major Romanian newspapers and across the government ministries.

The permeation of the state by these networks comes to light only occa­sionally. In October 2015, a nightclub fire in Bucharest killed sixty-four, more than half the deaths due to infections contracted later at a local hospital. Why? The hospital’s disinfectants, concocted by a company called Hexi Pharma to which the government had granted a monopoly"

By coincidence, I'm rereading Tobias Jones' "The Dark Heart of Italy" (2003) and am struck by the uncanny parallels of the insights of that book about the Italian system with the current situation here in Romania - not least the systemic corrupt-ness, amorality and politicisation....

"Bridge of Friendship" interview

I’m “chuffed” at being the focus of a long interview published this week by a young Bulgarian journalist – on a bi-lingual venture called Bridge of Friendship, Vlad Mitev is based in Russe - which boasts the bridge of that name (over the Danube) – and uses his location to write in Bulgarian and Romanian (and often in English) about various aspects of his region. Not only economic (his original focus) but cultural aspects come within his remit. In this cross-border focus, he is quite exceptional… and deserves support.

I had been intrigued by his blog and we had met up earlier in the summer – in Russe – on my way back to Bucharest which is, of course, a mere 60 kms from the Danube and Bulgaria and it was there he sprung on me his idea of an extended interview. Hardly the shy and retiring type, I was only too happy to oblige….

Behind his modest facade, he’s a tough cookie and soon made it clear he would take no diversionary nonsense from me as, inevitably, I tried to move the discussion into more familiar waters…..For Vlad I was merely an intriguing specimen of a Brit who had apparently opted to make his home in both Bulgaria and Romania and he wanted to explore not so much my reasons for this - as my impressions of the two countries and their differences; and any thoughts I might have about the scope for more cooperation… 

One would have to be a bit insensitive to straddle two countries without gaining some impressions – which, of course, always say more about the visitor and his values than the “natives”. And the more countries I have lived in (almost twelve I think) the more fascinated I have become with cultural aspects (in the widest sense). 
It’s not just history and the language which poses a problem at the Danube – it’s the very alphabet! So it’s hardly surprising that people say that people tend to turn their backs to one another at the river. For a few weeks, a couple of years ago, I entertained the thought of helping to develop a cross-border project based on cultural aspects – but simply could not drum up enough interest from my (admittedly limited) networks….. 

The interview gave me full rein for hyperlinks - and a list at the end gives full access to key texts…...

Earlier in the year I tried to celebrate the principle of bridge building – across the boundaries which divide groups – not just nations – but classes, intellectual disciplines and professions. At an early age, I found myself a lot in “no-man’s land” operating a fairly solitary role but, ultimately, one which offered me exciting new perspectives. But it was, apparently, a central European saying that “the problem with bridges is that horses shit on them in peacetime and they are the first thing to be blown up in times of war”

But Vlad’s efforts on Bridge of Friendship deserve everyone’s admiration – and support 

When will it ever change???

Another long post whose basic argument I can perhaps best summarise thus –

- People were overly optimistic in 1990/91 when they talked of one or two generations being necessary for a democratic culture to take hold in central europe

- most locals in Bulgaria and Romania are fatalistic about the glacial pace of reform

- but know exactly where the blockages are

- few external academic or consultants have even bothered to look at progress in improving state capacity in this part of the world – in the ten years during which billions of euros of European Structural Funds has been under local control...

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 a few 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”.

These are salutary comments for those with too mechanistic an approach to institution-building.  Notwithstanding the tons of books on organisational cultures and cultural change, political cultures cannot be engineered. Above all, they will not be reformed from a project approach based on using bodyshops, cowboy companies, short-term funding from the EC Structural Funds and the logframe.

The European Commission made a decision in 1997 which shocked me to the core – that EC technical assistance to central European and Balkan countries would no longer be governed by “developmental” objectives but rather by their ability to meet the formal legal requirement of the Acquis Commaunitaire (AC)…….ie of EU membership

In the mid 90s, the Head of the European Delegation to Romania (Karen Fogg 1993-98) used to give every visiting consultant a summary of Robert Putnam’s Making Democracy Work – civic traditions in modern Italy (1993). This suggested that the “amoral familism” of southern Italian Regions (well caught in a 1958 book of Edward Banfield’s) effectively placed them 300 years behind the northern regions.

Romania, for its part, had some 200 years under the Ottoman and the Phanariot thumbs - but then had 50 years of autonomy during which it developed all the indications of modernity (if plunging latterly into  Fascism). The subsequent experience of Romanian communism, however, created a society in which, paradoxically, deep distrust became the norm – with villagers forcibly moved to urban areas to drive industrialisation; the medical profession enrolled to check that women were not using contraceptives or abortion; and Securitate spies numbering one in every three citizens.

The institutions of the Romanian state collapsed at Xmas 1989 and were subsequently held together simply by the informal pre-existing networks – not least those of the old Communist party and of the Securitate. Tom Gallagher’s “Theft of a Nation” superbly documented the process in 2005.

These were the days when a body of literature called “path dependency” was raising important questions about how free we are to shake off cultural values…. Authors such as de Hofstede; Ronald Inglehart; FransTrompenaars; and Richard Lewis (in his When cultures collide were telling us how such values affect our everyday behaviour.  

Sorin Ionitsa’s booklet on Poor Policy Making in Weak States (2006) captured brilliantly the profound influence of the different layers of cultural values on political and administrative behavior in Romania which continue to this day. His focus was on Romania but the explanations he offers for the poor governance in that country has resonance for many other countries and therefore warrant reproduction  

- “The focus of the political parties is on winning and retaining power to the exclusion of any interest in policy – or implementation process”

- “Political figures fail to recognise and build on the programmes of previous regimes – and simply don’t understand the need for “trade-offs” in government. There is a (technocratic/academic) belief that perfect solutions exist; and that failure to achieve them is due to incompetence or bad intent”.

- “Policymaking is centred on the drafting and passing of legislation. “A policy is good or legitimate when it follows the letter of the law − and vice versa. Judgments in terms of social costs and benefits are very rare”.

“This legalistic view leaves little room for feasibility assessments in terms of social outcomes, collecting feedback or making a study of implementation mechanisms. What little memory exists regarding past policy experiences is never made explicit (in the form of books, working papers, public lectures, university courses, etc): it survives as a tacit knowledge of public servants who happened to be involved in the process at some point or other. And as central government agencies are notably numerous and unstable – i.e. appearing, changing their structure and falling into oblivion every few years - institutional memory is not something that can be perpetuated”

His booklet remains one of the few which explores such issues which are so crucial for the development of this part of the world; and he also refers to other “pre-modern” aspects of the civil service – such as unwillingness to share information and experiences across various organisational boundaries. And to the existence of a “dual system” of poorly paid lower and middle level people in frustrating jobs headed by younger, Western-educated elite which "talks the language of reform - but treats its position as a temporary placement on the way to better things".

 “Entrenched bureaucracies have learned from experience that they can always prevail in the long run by paying lip service to reforms while resisting them in a tacit way. They do not like coherent strategies, transparent regulations and written laws – they prefer the status quo, and daily instructions received by phone from above. This was how the communist regime worked; and after its collapse the old chain of command fell apart, though a deep contempt for law and transparency of action remained a ‘constant’ in involved persons’ daily activities.

Such an institutional culture is self-perpetuating in the civil service, the political class and in society at large”. “A change of generations is not going to alter the rules of the game as long as recruitment and socialization follow the same old pattern: graduates from universities with low standards are hired through clientelistic mechanisms; performance when on the job is not measured; tenure and promotion are gained via power struggles.

“In general, the average Romanian minister has little understanding of the difficulty and complexity of the tasks he or she faces, or he/she simply judges them impossible to accomplish. Thus they focus less on getting things done, and more on developing supportive networks, because having collaborators one can trust with absolute loyalty is the obsession of all local politicians - and this is the reason why they avoid formal institutional cooperation or independent expertise. In other words, policymaking is reduced to nothing more than politics by other means. And when politics becomes very personalized or personality-based, fragmented and pre-modern, turf wars becomes the rule all across the public sector.”

Ionitsa’s booklet was, of course, written more than a decade ago but I see nothing to suggest that much has changed in Romania in the intervening period. Since 2007, of course, it has been Romanian experts who have been employed as consultants but they have essentially been singing from the same song-sheet as western consultants

I’ve used the phrase “impervious regimes” to cover the mixture of autocracies, kleptocracies and incipient democracies with which I have become all too familiar in the last 27 years; have faulted the toolkits and Guides which the European Commission offers consultants; and proposed some ideas for a different, more incremental and “learning” approach.

I’m glad to say that just such a new approach began to surface a few years ago – known variously as “doing development differently”, or the iterative or political analysis…….it was presaged almost 10 years ago by the World Bank’s Governance Reforms under real world conditions written around the sorts of questions we consultants deal with on a daily basis - one paper in particular (which starts part 2 of the book) weaves a very good theory around 3 words – acceptance, authority and ability. I enthused about the approach in a 2010 post

But there is a strange apartheid in consultancy and scholastic circles between those engaged in “development”, on the one hand, and those in “organisational reform” in the developed world, on the other…..The newer EU member states are now assumed to be fully-fledged systems (apart from a bit of tinkering still needed in their judicial systems – oh…. and Hungary and Poland have gone back on some fundamental elements of liberal democracy…..!). But they all remain sovereign states – subject only to their own laws plus those enshrined in EC Directives…. Structural Funds grant billions of euros to the new member states which are managed by each country’s local consultants who use the “best practice” tools - which anyone with any familiarity with “path dependency” or “cultural” or even anthropological theory would be able to tell them are totally inappropriate to local conditions..…

But the local consultants are working to a highly rationalistic managerial framework imposed on them by the European Commission; are, for the most part, young and trained to western thought. They know that the brief projects on which they work have little sustainability but – heh – look at the hundreds of millions of euros which will continue to roll in as far as the eye can see…..!!!

Someone in central Europe needs to be brave enough to shout out that ”the Emperor has no clothes!!” To challenge the apartheid in scholastic circles….and to realise the relevance of Ionitsa’s 11- year old booklet and Governance Reforms under real world conditions