The God that failed – in central Europe

In just a couple of weeks it will be the 30^th anniversary of the Fall of the Berlin Wall – with the precise date of any single country’s “liberation” from communism varying according to local events. Here in Romania it will be partly the Timisoara protests of early December but you can actually witness for yourself the dramatic collapse of the regime two and half minutes into this video of the supportive demonstration of 21 December 1989 which had been organised for Ceausescu. The trial and summary execution of the Ceausescu couple on 24 December stirs uneasy memories in the country.

What celebrations there are in the region as a whole will be somewhat muted – with at least one academic conference taking place in Prague in mid-December with a range of topics for discussion.

The trigger for today’s post was an excerpt from one of what may be an avalanche of books about the extent to which the past 30 years have realised (or not) the hopes and fears of the citizens of central and eastern Europe.
The new book is called The Light that Failed – a reckoning and has two highly qualified authors – Ivan Krastev, a high-profile Bulgarian political scientist based in Vienna and his own Think Tank in Sofia, and Stephen Holmes, professor political science and law and specialist in liberalism and post-communism their arguments got a preview in an article in last year's "Journal of Democracy"

This excerpt is a useful intro -

In the first years after 1989, liberalism was generally associated with the ideals of individual opportunity, freedom to move and to travel, unpunished dissent, access to justice and government responsiveness to public demands.

By 2010, the central and eastern European versions of liberalism had been indelibly tainted by two decades of rising social inequality, pervasive corruption and the morally arbitrary redistribution of public property into the hands of small number of people. The economic crisis of 2008 had bred a deep distrust of business elites and the casino capitalism that, writ large, almost destroyed the world financial order

……

Focusing on the corruption and deviousness of illiberal governments in the region will not help us understand the sources of popular support for national populist parties. The origins of populism are undoubtedly complex. But they partly lie in the humiliations associated with the uphill struggle to become, at best, an inferior copy of a superior model.

Discontent with the “transition to democracy” in the post-communist years was also inflamed by visiting foreign “evaluators” who had little grasp of local realities. These experiences combined to produce a nativist reaction in the region, a reassertion of “authentic” national traditions allegedly suffocated by ill-fitting western forms. The post-national liberalism associated with EU enlargement allowed aspiring populists to claim exclusive ownership of national traditions and national identity.

The wave of anti-liberalism sweeping over central Europe today reflects widespread popular resentment at the perceived slights to national and personal dignity that this palpably sincere reform-by-imitation project entailed……

Almost a year ago I had a series of posts which tried to do justice to feelings in Romania after almost 30 years

- 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

But I think Krastev and Holmes are right to emphasise the psychological aspects of the humiliation involved in having to copy a foreign model. This is actually better explained in an article of theirs earlier this year in the Eurozine journal.

The process was called by different names – democratization, liberalization, enlargement, convergence, integration, Europeanization – but the goal pursued by post-communist reformers was simple. They wished their countries to become ‘normal’, which meant like the West. This involved importing liberal-democratic institutions, applying western political and economic recipes, and publicly endorsing western values. Imitation was widely understood to be the shortest pathway to freedom and prosperity.

Pursuing economic and political reform by imitating a foreign model, however, turned out to have steeper moral and psychological downsides than many had originally expected.

The imitator’s life inescapably produces feelings of inadequacy, inferiority, dependency, lost identity, and involuntary insincerity. Indeed, the futile struggle to create a truly credible copy of an idealized model involves a never-ending torment of self-criticism if not self-contempt.

What makes imitation so irksome is not only the implicit assumption that the mimic is somehow morally and humanly inferior to the model. It also entails the assumption that central and eastern Europe’s copycat nations accept the West’s right to evaluate their success or failure at living up to Western standards.

In this sense, imitation comes to feel like a loss of sovereignty.

Thus, the rise of authoritarian chauvinism and xenophobia in central and eastern Europe has its roots not in political theory, but in political psychology. It reflects a deep-seated disgust at the post-1989 ‘imitation imperative’, with all its demeaning and humiliating implications.

And Krastev and Holmes’ Eurozine article goes on make a second crucial point of huge cultural significance –

In the eyes of conservative Poles in the days of the Cold War, western societies were normal because, unlike communist systems, they cherished tradition and believed in God. Then suddenly Poles discovered that western ‘normality’ today means secularism, multiculturalism and gay marriage. Should we be surprised that Poles and their neighbours felt ‘cheated’ when they found out that the society they wanted to imitate had disappeared, washed away by the swift currents of modernization?

If, in the immediate aftermath of 1989, ‘normality’ was understood largely in political terms (free elections, separation of powers, private property, and the right to travel), during the last decade normality has increasingly come to be interpreted in cultural terms. As a result, Central and East Europeans are becoming mistrustful and resentful of norms coming from the West. Ironically, as we shall see below, eastern Europe is now starting to view itself as the last bastion of genuine European values.

In order to reconcile the idea of ‘normal’ (meaning what is widespread at home) with what is normatively obligatory in the countries they aim to imitate, eastern Europeans consciously or unconsciously have begun to ‘normalize’ the model countries, arguing that what is widespread in the East is also prevalent in the West, even though westerners hypocritically pretend that their societies are different. Eastern Europeans often relieve their normative dissonance – say, between paying bribes to survive in the East and fighting corruption to be accepted in the West – by concluding that the West is really just as corrupt as the East, but westerners are simply in denial and hiding the truth.

There is a third and even more powerful reason why the Eurozine article tells the story better. And that is because it emphasises that recent events have utterly transformed our emotional response to the phrase “open society” -

The dominant storyline of the illiberal counterrevolution in central and eastern Europe is encapsulated in the inversion of the meaning of the idea of an ‘open society’. In 1989, the open society meant a promise of freedom, above all a freedom to do what had been previously forbidden, namely to travel to the West. Today, openness to the world, for large swaths of the central and eastern European electorate, connotes not freedom but danger: immigrant invasion, depopulation, and loss of national sovereignty.

The refugee crisis of 2015 brought the region’s brewing revolt against individualism and universalism to a head. What central and eastern Europeans realized in the course of the refugee crisis was that, in our connected but unequal world, migration is the most revolutionary revolution of them all. The twentieth-century revolt of the masses is a thing of the past. We are now facing a twenty-first-century revolt of the migrants. Undertaken anarchically, not by organized revolutionary parties but by millions of disconnected individuals and families, this revolt faces no collective-action problems. It is inspired not by ideologically coloured pictures of a radiant, imaginary future, but by glossy photos of life on the other side of the border.

Hungary and Poland seem at the moment the only countries to be pursuing a strong agenda of illiberalism which have transgressed EU standards of Rule of Law – although both Bulgarian and Romanian judicial systems remain under the aegis an annual cooperation and verification system which has indeed just reported.

But the combination of an ageing population, low birth rates and an unending stream of emigration is arguably the source of demographic panic in central and eastern Europe.

Anxiety about immigration is fomented by a fear that supposedly unassimilable foreigners will enter the country, dilute national identity and weaken national cohesion. This fear, in turn, is fuelled by a largely unspoken preoccupation with demographic collapse. In the period 1989–2017, Latvia haemorrhaged 27% of its population, Lithuania 22.5%, and Bulgaria almost 21%. In Romania, 3.4 million people, a vast majority of them younger than 40, left the country after it joined the EU in 2007.

More central and eastern Europeans left their countries for western Europe as a result of the 2008-9 financial crises than all the refugees that came there as the result of the war in Syria.

The extent of post-1989 emigration from eastern and central Europe, awakening fears of national disappearance, helps explain the deeply hostile reaction across the region to the refugee crisis of 2015-16, even though very few refugees have relocated to the countries of the region. We might even hypothesise that anti-immigration politics in a region essentially without immigrants is an example of what some psychologists call displacement – a defence mechanism by which, in this case, minds unconsciously blot out a wholly unacceptable threat and replace it with one still serious but conceivably easier to manage. Hysteria about non-existent immigrants about to overrun the country represents the substitution of an illusory danger (immigration) for the real danger (depopulation and demographic collapse) that cannot speak its name……..

To protect this besieged majority’s fragile dominance from the insidious alliance of Brussels and Africa, the argument goes, Europeans need to replace the watery individualism and universalism foisted on them by liberals with a muscular identity politics or group particularism of their own. 

This is the logic with which Orbán and the leader of PiS in Poland, Jarosław Kaczyński, have tried to inflame the inner xenophobic nationalism of their countrymen. The ultimate revenge of the central and eastern European populists against western liberalism is not merely to reject the idea of imitating the west, but to invert it. We are the real Europeans, Orbán and Kaczyński repeatedly claim, and if the west wants to save itself, it will have to imitate the east.

the Continental Divide in Public management studies

The last post made a rather casual suggestion that “public administration reform” efforts have been analysed in very different ways in “developed” and “developing” countries respectively….I went so far indeed as to suggest there was a state of apartheid between two bodies of literature which are perhaps best exemplified by using the words “managerial” and “economic” for the literature which has come in the last 25 years from the OECD (using largely the concepts of New Public Management) whereas the UNDP and The World Bank use the language of “capacity development” and “politics” (the WB in the last decade certainly) in the advisory documents they have produced for what we used to call the “developing” world (mainly Africa).

In fact probably at least four bodies of literature should be distinguished - which can be grouped to a certain extent by a mixture of language and culture. I offer this table with some trepidation – it’s what I call “impressionistic” and perhaps raises more questions than it answers -

The Different Types of commentary on state reform efforts

Source	Culture	Occupational bias of writers	overviews which give a good sense of status of reform
Anglo-saxon;	adversarial	Academic Eg Chris Pollitt; Chris Hood, Mark Moore, Colin Talbot	International Public Administration Reform – implications for Russia Nick Manning and Neil Parison (World Bank 2004)
West European;	consensual	Lawyers, sociologists   Eg Thoenig; Wollman	State and Local Government Reforms in France and Germany (2006)  Public and Social Services in Europe ed Wollman, Kopric and Marcou (2016)
Africa and Asia	clientilist	Foreign consultants   Eg Tom Carothers	Governance Reform under Real-World Conditions – citizens, stakeholders and Voice (World Bank 2008)   People, Politics and Change - building communications strategy for governance reform (World Bank 2011)
Central and East European	clientilist	Local consultants	Public Administration in the Balkans – overview (SIGMA 2004) Poor Policy Making in Weak States; Sorin Ionita (2006) Administrative Capacity in the new EU Member States – the Limits of Innovation? Tony Verheijen (World Bank 2007) The Sustainability of Civil Service Reforms in ECE; Meyer-Sayling (OECD 2009) Democracy’s Plight in the European Neighbourhood: Struggling Transitions and Proliferating Dynasties (Youngs et al 2009)  A House of Cards? Building the rule of law in ECE; Alina Mungiu-Pippidi (2010)
South European?	clientilist	Local consultants

 People in Central Europe wanting to get a sense of how a system of government might actually be changed for the better are best advised to go to the theories of change which have been developed in the literature on international development eg the World Bank’s Reports of 2008 and 2011 which I reference in the third line of the table.  

The paper by Matthew Andrews which starts part 2 of the first book weaves an interesting theory around 3 words – ”acceptance”, ”authority” and ”ability”.

Is there acceptance of the need for change and reform within the incentive fabric of the organization (not just with individuals)?

·             of the specific reform idea?

·             of the monetary costs for reform?

·             of the social costs for reformers? 

Is there authority:

·             does legislation allow people to challenge the status quo and initiate reform?

·             do formal organizational structures and rules allow reformers to do what is needed?

·             do informal organizational norms allow reformers to do what needs to be done? 

Is there ability: are there enough people, with appropriate skills,

·             to conceptualize and implement the reform?

·             is technology sufficient?

·             are there appropriate information sources to help conceptualize, plan, implement, and institutionalize the reform?

My previous post had quoted extensively from Sorin Ionita’s Poor Policy Making in Weak States. Ionitsa had clearly read Matt Andrew’s work since he writes about Romania that 

”constraints on improving of policy management are to be found firstly in low (political) acceptance (of the legitimacy of new approaches and transparency); secondly, in low authority (meaning that nobody, for example, knows who exactly is in charge of prioritization across sectors) and only thirdly in low technical ability in institutions”

 A diagram in that World Bank paper shows that each of these three elements plays a different role at what are four stages - namely conceptualisation, initiation, transition and institutionalisation. However the short para headed “Individual champions matter less than networks” – was the one that hit a nerve for me. 

“The individual who connects nodes is the key to the network but is often not the one who has the technical idea or who is called the reform champion. His or her skill lies in the ability to bridge relational boundaries and to bring people together. Development is fostered in the presence of robust networks with skilled connectors acting at their heart.” 

My mind was taken back more than 30 years when, as the guy in charge of Strathclyde Region’s strategy to combat deprivation and, using my combined political and academic roles, I established an “urban change network” to bring together once a month a diverse collection of officials and councillors of different municipalities in the West of Scotland, academics and NGO people to explore how we could extend our understanding of what we were dealing with – and how our policies might make more impact. Notes were written up and circulated……and fed into a process of a more official evaluation of a deprivation strategy which had been formulated 5 years earlier.

The central core of that review (in 1981) consisted of 5 huge Community Conferences and produced a little red book called “Social Strategy for the 80s” which was of the first things a newly-elected Council approved in 1982. It was, for me, a powerful example of “embedding” change.  

It is a truism in the training world that it is almost impossible to get senior executives on training courses since they think they have nothing to learn – and this is particularly true of the political class. Not only do politicians (generally) think they have nothing to learn but they have managed very successfully to ensure that noone ever carries out critical assessments of their world. They commission or preside over countless inquiries into all the other systems of society – but rarely does their world come under proper scrutiny. Elections are assumed to give legitimacy to anything. Media exposure is assumed to keep politicians on their toes – but a combination of economics, patterns of media ownership and journalistic laziness has meant an end to investigative journalism and its replacement with cheap attacks on politicians which simply breeds public cynicism and indifference. And public cynicism and indifference is the oxygen in which ”impervious power” thrives!

The last of the assessments for central europe I have in my files is Mungiu-Pippidi’s from 2010 (!!) and most of the papers in that box of my table talks of the need to force the politicians in this part of the world to grow up and stop behaving like petulant schoolboys and girls. Manning and Ionitsa both emphasise the need for transparency and external pressures. Verheijen talks of the establishment of structures bringing politicians, officials, academics etc together to develop a consensus. But Ionitsa puts it most succinctly – 

 ”If a strong requirement is present – and the first openings must be made at the political level – the supply can be generated fairly rapidly, especially in ex-communist countries, with their well-educated manpower. But if the demand is lacking, then the supply will be irrelevant”.