what you get here

This is not a blog which opines on current events. It rather uses incidents, books (old and new), links and papers to muse about our social endeavours.
So old posts are as good as new! And lots of useful links!

The Bucegi mountains - the range I see from the front balcony of my mountain house - are almost 120 kms from Bucharest and cannot normally be seen from the capital but some extraordinary weather conditions allowed this pic to be taken from the top of the Intercontinental Hotel in late Feb 2020
Showing posts with label distrust. Italy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label distrust. Italy. Show all posts

Thursday, November 1, 2018

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 20th 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
Impervious Power (Jan 2017)

Academic articles on political culture - and Romania

A Guide to Change and change management for Rule of Law practitioners (2015)
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 – borderland of Europe; Lucian Boia (2001) Very readable and well translated