Anti-Corruption – a Great Game no longer

Other societies and their cultures are strange – so we invent stories to help us understand their behavior. Thus the French are argumentative and the Germans methodical…Some people indeed have made careers from explaining local behaviour to visitors eg Geert de Hodstede, Richard Lewis and Frans Trompenaars. Add in some scandal and wrongdoing, and you soon have a full-scale industry – namely that of anti-corruption. This post is my attempt as an outsider to offer an overview of that literature of the past 30 years.….

When, in the late 1990s, I first noticed this development, my judgement was that the “best practice” being offered was very much what the sociologists, rather euphemistically, call “an ideal type” ie a version of reality one rarely finds in practice. This is what I wrote at the time – 

A lot of what the global community preaches as “good practice” in government structures is actually of very recent vintage in their own countries and is still often more rhetoric than actual practice.

Of course public appointments, for example, should be made on merit – and not on the basis of family, ethnic or religious networks. But civil service appointments and structures in Belgium and Netherlands, to name but two European examples, were – until very recently – influenced by religious and party considerations. In those cases a system which is otherwise rule-based and transparent has had minor adjustments made to take account of strong social realities and ensure consensus. 

But in the case of countries such as Northern Ireland (until recently) the form and rhetoric of objective administration in the public good had been completely undermined by religious divisions. All public goods (eg housing and appointments) were, until the end of the 20^th century, made in favour of Protestants.

The Italian system has for decades been notorious for the systemic abuse of the machinery of the state by various powerful groups – with eventually the Mafia itself clearly controlling some key parts of it. American influence played a powerful part in sustaining this in the post-war period – but the collapse of communism removed that influence and has allowed the Italians to have a serious attempt at reforming the system. At least for a few years – before Berlusconi scuppered it all  

These are well-known cases – but the more we look, the more we find that countries which have long boasted of their fair and objective public administration systems have in fact suffered serious intrusions by sectional interests.

The British and French indeed have invented words to describe the informal systems which perverted the apparent neutrality and openness of their public administration – the “old boy network” which was still the basis of the senior civil service in Britain in the 1960s and 1970s a century after the first major reform. And the elitist and closed nature of the French ENArque system has, in the new millennium, become the subject of heated debate in that country.

In many countries, local government appointments systems were, until very recently, strongly politicised - and it is clear that national european systems are becoming more politicised. This trend was started by Margaret Thatcher who simply did not trust the senior civil service to do what she needed. She brought in individuals who had proved their worth in the private sector and came into government service for a limited period of time (sometimes part-time and unpaid) to do a specific task which the Minister or Prime Minister judged the civil servants to be incapable of doing.

Her critique of the UK Civil Service was twofold – first that those at the top were so balanced and objective in their advice that they lacked the appetite to help lead and implement the changes she considered British society needed; and second that those further down the ladder lacked the management skills necessary to manage public services. The Labour Government since 1997 inherited a civil service they considered somewhat contaminated by 18 years of such dominant political government – and had more than 200 such political appointees. Such trends are very worrying for the civil service which has lost the influence and constraining force they once had. 

Conclusion; Too much of the commentary of international bodies on transition countries seems oblivious to this history and these realities – and imagines that a mixture of persuasive rhetoric and arm-twisting can lead to relevant, rapid and significant changes. A bit more humility is needed – and more thought about the realistic trajectory of change. To recognize this is not, however, to condone a system of recruitment by connections – “people we know”. Celebration of cultural differences can sometimes be used to legitimize practices which undermine social coherence and organizational effectiveness. And the acid test of a State body is whether the public thinks they are getting good public services delivered in an acceptable way! 

The two decades since then have seen national reputations for integrity challenged – the British judicial system, for example, took a battering after a series of revelations of judicial cockups and its policing has always been suspect. But it was 2015 before a book with the title ”How Corrupt is Britain?” Ed by D Whyte appeared – followed a few years later by “Democracy for Sale - dark money and dirty politics”; by Peter Geoghegan (2020).  

A later post will pursue this post-modernist disenchantment with the western institutions of which we used to be so proud.

For the moment, it's the situation in the new member states I want to focus on. Ralf Dahrendorf was probably the first to suggest (in 1990) that it would take the newly independent states of central and eastern Europe at least two generations to develop full Rule of Law and a properly functioning civil society. I vividly remember in the mid-1990s the EU’s first Ambassador to Romania (Karen Fogg) giving every visiting consultant such as me a copy of a review of Robert Putnam’s “Making Democracy Work” which contrasted northern and southern Italy and suggested that the latter’s emphasis on family connections put it several centuries behind the north (This little article in the current copy of NLR would suggest that was an overoptimistic interpretation of the North!). This is the same Robert Putnam who coined the concept of “social capital” which was taken up with great enthusiasm for a decade or so by the World Bank and academics but is critically assessed here. Although Robert Putnam gets the credit for making the idea of “social capital” or “trust” a central one in the mid 1990s, it was Francis Fukuyama who, for me, wrote the most interesting book on the subject – namely "Trust and the creation of prosperity” (1995)

Putnam’s book was based on an earlier work by an older American political scientist – Edward Banfield – who had, with his Italian wife, spent two years in the mid 1950s in a small Italian village in the south and subsequently produced a famous book “The Moral Basis of a Backward Society” (1958) which fixed the peculiarities of Italian society in the popular mind – until the Godfather films came along. “The never-ending debate about the moral basis of a backward society” is an excellent 2009 article by Emiliane Ferragina which explored the influence of the books. 

The first wave of enthusiasm, in global bodies and academia alike, for anti-corruption (or “good governance” as it was more diplomatically called) strategies ended in the new millennium – when a note of realism became evident. It was at that stage that I realized that some of the best analyses were coming from the anthropologists

Further Reading

Shifting obsessions – 3 essays on the politics of anti-corruption Ivan Krastev (2004) Bulgarian political scientist exposes the hypocrisy behind the rhetoric

Syndromes of corruption – wealth,power and democracy Michael Johnson (2005) An American political scientist who has been involved with the Transparency International work does good comparative work here

Corruption – anthropological perspectives edited by D Haller and C Shore (2005) quite excellent collection of case studies

Confronting Corruption, building accountability – lessons from the world of international development advising L Dumas, J Wedel and G Callman (2010)

Unaccountable – how anti-corruption watchdogs and lobbyists sabotaged america’s finance, freedom and security ; J Wedel (2016) another anthropologist

Making Sense of Corruption; Bo Rothstein (2017) one of the clearest expositions – this time by a Scandinavian political scientist

comment from Patrick Cockburn on the corruption of the British political class

Crowds and Power in Sofia and Bucharest - II

The Nobel-prize winning author Elias Canetti was born in the Bulgarian city of Russe on the Danube in 1905 and would have had quite a few things to say about the protests in Sofia. Better known ironically (thanks to his own autobiographical efforts) as one of British novelist and philosopher Iris Murdoch’s many lovers, his “Crowds and Power” (1960) vies with Le Bon’s as the classic treatise on the subject. The book - a  strange mixture of anthropology and social psychology and now, understandably, enjoying a new lease of life - warned of the unpredictable ebb and flow of the crowd. It is, most definitely, not a Marxist take on the subject – for which one should turn to criminologist Matt Clement’s “A People’s History of Riot, Protest and the Law – the Sound of the Crowd” (2016)

Vlad Mitev is a young Bulgarian journalist who also lives in Russe and has a trilingual HYPERLINK "https://movafaq.wordpress.com/category/limba-език-language/english/"Bridge of Friendship blogHYPERLINK "https://movafaq.wordpress.com/category/limba-език-language/english/" which covers political and cultural developments on both sides of that last section of the river Danube. He’s also editor of the Romanian section of "HYPERLINK "https://en.baricada.org/"BaricadaHYPERLINK "https://en.baricada.org/""HYPERLINK "https://en.baricada.org/" , a leftist journal based in Sofia which boasts Bulgarian, Polish and Romanian writers. He and I worked together on an early draft of this piece before deciding to focus on what we each felt we knew best. I’m also grateful for the insights I’ve gained over the years from Daniela, my Romanian companion and conspirator,

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.

·         some two generations to create a functioning civil society there.

 

What had in 1989 seemed a bloody Revolution in Romania was later exposed as more of a simple regime change. Personnel and systems remained in place and it was to be 1996 - with the election of Emil Constantinescu as President - before new winds started to challenge the old systems and structures of power. By then the scions of the country's privileged families were being inculcated in the pro-market celebratory doctrines that pass for education in American Business Schools; and the country's (strong) intelligentsia had spent several years quaffing at Friedrich Hayek's fountain.

 

Privatisation was at last allowed to let rip – with the local oligarchs soon becoming indistinguishable from the politicians.

When Bulgaria’s PM Ivan Kostov was asked why crony capitalism was flourishing under his rule, his revealing comments was

 

“Bulgaria is a small country. We are all cousins”

 

Eastern Europe as a whole was offered a deadly deal which has almost destroyed these countries – almost 2 million Bulgarians and Romanians prop up the British and German economies; Bulgaria has the unenviable position of losing its population at a faster rate than any other country in the world - and Romania is not far behind. And the pensioners who are expected to exist on a monthly pension of less than 200 euros a month – when the prices in the shops are at western level.

 

Austrian and Italian companies have taken over the jewels of the Bulgarian and Romanian timber, banking and agribusiness sectors after the massive privatisation which was made a condition of their membership of the EU and NATO.

That last has meant of course militarisation, high expenditures on military procurement and reduced social spending. Bulgaria recently concluded a deal for American fighter aircraft at a cost of 2 billion dollars – placing it at the top of the global table for increased military spending since 2010 – with a 167% increase (Romania is at 150%)

 

The Bulgarian protests

But it is the EC Structural Funds with their hundreds of billions of euros which lie behind the ongoing street protests in Sofia - directed generally against the country's systemic corruption and, specifically, against Prime Minister Borisov (who used to be the bodyguard of first the ex-dictator Zhivkov and then PM King Simeon II) as well as the Chief Prosecutor Ivan Geshev - whose raid on the offices of popular President Radev in July raised big questions.

Unlike previous street protests in Sofia, this one has attracted wider support – for example from a previous Justice Minister, Hristo Ivanov who launched a mock incursion on the Black Sea home of one of the country’s political oligarchs

 

The incident transformed Ivanov’s image from detached intellectual to maverick politician setting the terms of public debate, and his centre-right Democratic Bulgaria coalition doubled its support in the polls. “This was not simply the PR action of the year but of the decade,” said Petar Cholakov, a political analyst and sociologist from the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences.

 

The two countries separated by the River Danube don't usually have a great deal to do with one another - one is strongly in the EU/Atlantic Alliance camp - the other's 150-year-old ties with Russia still reverberate. But, in recent years, Romania (at least in western eyes) has made significant progress in fighting corruption - measured at least in terms of the number of politicians and ex-Ministers it has managed to put in jail. When Bulgarian activists began to call this out, the power structure tried to defuse the situation by appointing a crony as Prosecutor-General. This is a position which, unlike in Romania, has never been the subject of any reform.

 

Vlad Mitev’s recent Open Democracy article Bulgarian Protests - battle over anti-corruption gives some of the background to the Sofia protests

 

The Romanian anti-corruption formula was popular in Bulgaria until 2017-2018. Romanian anti-corruption had gained its fame under the leadership of the former chief prosecutor of the National Anti-corruption Directorate (DNA) Laura Kövesi, now chief prosecutor of the European Public Prosecutor’s Office.

 

As Romanian Chief prosecutor from 2013 to 2018, she presided over numerous arrests of politicians, widely reported in the international press. The “Romanian model of anti-corruption” was lauded in the western media as an exemplary model for delivering justice and building the rule of law. The model of anti-corruption based on a powerful Chief Prosecutor’s office thus came to be seen in Bulgaria as a path towards a European standard of living. The Bulgarian middle class seemed to envy their Romanian counterparts...

 

But a subsequent article by Mitev in “Baricada” laid more emphasis on the class nature evident in the protests – which the western media has totally failed to pick up -

 

It is interesting to note that in the earlier wave of anti-oligarchic protests in Bulgaria in 2013 the protesters were called by media and society “the beautiful and the clever ones”, which was a direct reference to the narcissism of their representatives’ and to the abyss that divides them from the “ugly” and “stupid” masses. Romania has an almost exact notion of the same type: “the beautiful and the free youth”, which gets abbreviated as “Tefelists” (TFL – tineri frumoşi şi liberi – beautiful and free youth).

These are important signals that important parts of the overall population feel distant and maybe even ethically superior to these protesting elites, who in turn believe that it is they who hold the ethical higher ground. And these notions have been used by politicians in a divide and conquer manner.

 

What was imported from Romania was the idea of an unrestrained Chief Prosecutor which suited Bulgaria’s new man Geshev down to the ground – as Mihai Evans explains in a recent Open Democracy article.

 

As the system is currently constituted there are simply no checks and balances that can rein in the conduct of the Bulgarian Prosecutor General, a position which is largely in the political gift of the government. The holder of this office has effective command of the entire judicial system and can stop any investigation, including a hypothetical one against himself. This has resulted in conduct that reached a nadir in a shocking series of events which saw a senior prosecutor murdered after making strongly worded criticisms of the then Prosecutor General. This appalling episode has never been satisfactory cleared up by investigators or the legal system. The family of the murdered man took a case, Kolevi v Bulgaria, to the European Court of Human Rights whose ruling was that Bulgaria must engage in extensive reforms of the prosecutors office.

 

Over a period of more than a decade, largely coinciding with the governments of Borisov, it has failed to do so. As a result, as Radosveta Vassileva, a fellow at University College, London’s Faculty of Law argues: “Bulgaria is permanently torn by scandals regarding non-random distribution of case files, abuses of judges and prosecutors who resist political orders, purposeful destruction of evidence by authorities etc.”. In recent years Bulgaria has been repeatedly convicted of violations of Article 6 of the European Convention on Human Rights for failing to ensure the rights of the accused. The Specialised Court for Organised Crime, a parallel system of courts ostensibly established to combat corruption have failed to convict a single politician (in contrast to Romania where dozens have been imprisoned, including the leader of the ruling Social Democrat Party last year). Legal scholars have accused both countries of failing to provide fair trials.

 

The Sofia protesters’ demand of a reform to the Bulgarian constitution (with the chief prosecutor’s prerogatives being curbed, the political influence over the judicial system curtailed and the judiciary strengthened) certainly suggests a continuing degree of faith in Bulgarian institutions or at least in their capacity to reform and be held accountable.

 

Pre Covid Hopes of “Normality”

"For a normal Romania" was the slogan used by the campaign of the ex-Mayor of the Transylvanian city of Sibiu in last autumn's elections as he fought to retain the Presidency he had surprisingly grabbed in 2015 from the jaws of defeat. The slogan expressed the dreams of many - not least the millions of younger Romanians (and Bulgarians) forced to emigrate in search of that dream.

 

Street protests in both countries are nothing new - although only in Romania have they succeeded in recent years in toppling governments. A so-called Social Democratic (PSD) government fell in 2015 as a result of a deadly fire in a Bucharest nightclub which exposed the scandalously lax regulations sustained by the greasing of hands.

Another scandal which engulfed Romania last summer started with the murder of a teenager whose terrified phone-call to the police was totally ignored. The revelation of the scale of the collusion between the Secret Service, prosecutors and the Anti-Corruption Agency in the country (a veritable Deep State) eventually led to the collapse of that PSD government as well - and the re-election in the subsequent Presidential election of the slow-witted but polarising Transylvanian Klaus Johannis

 

Bulgaria and Romania may have joined the EU in 2007 after a bit of a hiccup but they both still operate under a judicial cloud in the form of The Cooperation and Verification Mechanism (CVM) which subjects each country to an annual check of its legal and judicial health. Neither Bulgaria nor Romania are happy with the continued EU scrutiny but have at least managed to avoid the threat of sanctions which continues to hang over Hungary and Poland. And both countries have, largely, managed post-1989 to escape the right-wing virus to which they were exposed in the interwar period. For that we should all be profoundly grateful.

 

But neither country has been able to shake off the legacy of its past - which is much longer than just the half-century of communist influence. The Ottoman Empire had several centuries to engineer human souls – with the Greek Phanariots being given a measure of licence in Romania to exploit the locals whereas the Bulgarians lived under the direct yoke of the Ottomans.

In that respect, Dahrendorf was a bit optimistic in 1990 in suggesting that it would it take only 20 years to embed the Rule of Law and 2 generations (say 50 years) for civil society to be properly functioning! 

I’ll continue this post later

Links I Liked

 1. Heads or Hands?

It’s interesting that we should get 2 new books in a single month challenging one of the basic principles of our times – namely meritocracy.

That they should appear just as we began to notice the paradox of the “essential workers” (nurses, dustbin-men) earning a pittance whilst the “symbolic analysts” (in Reich’s famous phrase) sit on their backsides and rake in millions is nothing short of prescient.  

The Tyranny of Merit – what’s become of the common good? is philosopher Michael Sandel’s attack on the principle which, he argues, has led to hubris amongst the victors and humiliation amongst the losers. In 2009 Sandel delivered the prestigious BBC Reith Lecture for that year – on “Markets and Morals”

 David Goodhart is unlikely to receive such an invitation (although under the present Johnson government anything is possible). His work is too challenging – if not distasteful - for well-endowed liberal cosmopolitans. He does, however, have my respectful attention.   

In his just-published Head, Hand, Heart – the struggle for dignity and status in the 21^st Century, Goodhart dares to question the emphasis on the importance of university education which became such a shibboleth in the 1970s….- unlike the more sensible Germany….who have always prized and honoured practical skills and had a strong vocational training tradition.

 2. Germany as Exemplar?

I have this past week been working on an article about the Sofia street protests for a guest post the first part of which will appear tomorrow (Tuesday) on Boffy’s Blog - and then on this one.

The article asks what progress central and eastern Europe has or has not made in the past 30 years…starting with a quote from a famous little book “Reflections on the Revolution in Europe” written in 1990 by the anglo-german academic and liberal statesman, Ralf Dahrendorf – to the effect that the development of effective civil society would take 2 generations (viz 50 years)    

 Dahrendorf was a brilliant Anglo-German intellectual who, more than 30 years before his “Revolution in Europe”, had written a revisionist take on “Class and Class Conflict in Industrial Society” (1959 Eng trans) with which I was very taken just as I was starting my political sociology course.

A few years later he wrote a highly provocative analysis of his country - Society and Democracy in Germany (1967 Eng trans) – which argued that Germany could only then be called a “modern” society…..Nazism had at last broken the deference to authority which had until then been the country’s defining feature - this a mere 2 decades after Germany’s “Stunde Null”. The book caused quite a controversy both within and outside Germany. Geoffrey Eley was one British historian who disputed the analysis and went on to write an entire book about The Peculiarities of German History (1984)

 I’m reminded of all this by the release of yet another book about Germany - Why the Germans do it better – notes from a grown-up country

In the 1960s it was France and its planning system that many of us admired….it took another decade before we realised that the German Federal and training systems and worker representation on Boards were healthy features worth studying more closely.

It’s difficult to remember that the UK was the object of universal admiration if not envy – whereas it is now seen as a bit of a Banana Republic. Just look at the latest post on Chris Gray’s Brexit Blog – the descent into political insanity

I suppose one lesson is that all fortunes fall and rise – no one should ever give up hope on their country?

 3. Political Hubris – why we need to think seriously of Democracy by Lot

The idea of Citizen Assemblies has always impressed me – this article gives some recent examples.

It was Robert Michels’ Political Parties – a sociological study of the oligarchic tendencies of modern democracy (1911) which had alerted me in the 1960s to the insidious slide of political leadership - and made me so sympathetic to the German Greens attempts to control its leadership.  

 Pat Chalmers is one person with a vision of a different way of doing things. Author of Fraudcast News – how bad journalism supports our bogus democracies he has been campaigning for Democracy by Lot for some years.

After the recent UK and US experience of political leadership – which has allowed so-called leaders to run amok, I am at last persuaded that we do need to look seriously at this idea. We could start with this article….  

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…..

Memories of political sociology

My last post was bout the recent book - Grand Hotel Abyss – whose title refers to the accusation of the Marxist philosopher György Lukacs (and others) that the Frankfurt School “lived in a beautiful and comfortable hotel on the edge of an abys”.

I am indebted to a reviewer on the Amazon site for the further clarification that -

- they were Marxist or neo-Marxist theoreticians who lived a comfortable academic life but, with the exception of Marcuse, kept aloof from party politics and political struggle; part of the reason for this was that both in the United States and later in Germany they did not want to provoke the government or imperil funds they received from some wealthy supporters or research contracts they received from government departments;

- they contented themselves with analysis and understanding, but did not believe it was possible to change society because they thought the working class was not capable of revolution (explained partially in psychoanalytical terms by Erich Fromm);

- they distrusted the political left for an authoritarianism that was as bad as that of the Right; - in exile in America, they saw some similarities not only between the control mechanism of Hitlerian fascism and Stalinist communism but even between them and those of Roosevelt’s America – it was merely that Goebbels and Zhdanov were more open about what they were doing;

- they thought that capitalism was no longer likely to self-destruct; - the task now was to study these control mechanisms that kept it in place - mechanisms which went far beyond merely economic ones and that to understand them required a wider interdisciplinary cultural approach

This approach was the essence of Critical Theory. Not least by giving the book its title, Jeffries seems to agree with many of these charges, although he values many of the insights, critiques and influences of the School. Jeffries shows us the divisions within the Frankfurt School – notably that between Marcuse on the one hand and Adorno and Horkheimer on the other over the student revolt of 1967 to 1969, and that between the older founding generation with its profound and radical pessimism and the younger, more cautiously optimistic one, represented by Habermas, who, as Jeffries’ chapter heading has it, pulled the School “back from the abyss”.

The pragmatic Brits were impervious to the writings of the Frankfurt School – although they were, for reasons I fail to understand. seduced in the 80s by the charms of such Gallic poseurs as Sartre, Foucault, Baudrillard, Derrida and the improbably-named Lyotard.

But Adorno was in fact one of the authors, in 1950, of a famous book The Authoritarian Personality (1950) which was one of the first of a stream of books produced in the immediate post-war period to try to make sense of the power of the totalitarian model.

- Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) and

- JT Talmon’s The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy; (1952) were required reading on the small Political Sociology class I took under Zevedei Barbu - a Romanian who had defected in 1948 from the Romanian Legation in London (despite being an avowed communist who spent a couple of years in prison for the cause) 

-  and who had himself produced in 1956 Democracy and Dictatorship, attempting to explore the insights from combining both social psychology and sociology….You can read the entire book at the link but, be warned, the mixture of the depth and (linguistic) width of his reading; personal style; and awareness of the scale of his ambition does not make for easy reading. This is an original work which requires slow reading!!  The opening pages describe the contents in detail - and my advice is to select what seem to be relevant sections for you....

He was a great teacher – it was he who introduced me to Weber, Durkheim and Tonnies – let alone Michels and Pareto – all of whose insights still resonate with me.

Indeed it was almost certainly Barbu’s lectures which led me to register at the LSE in 1964 for a one-year MSc in Political Sociology – focusing on the development of post-war democracy in Germany. But I had also been powerfully influenced by Ralf Dahrendorf whose “Class and Class Conflict in Industrial Society” had come out in 1959 and who was just about to publish his “Society and Democracy in Germany” (1965) and, indeed, found myself registered with no less a figure than Ralph Miliband – of Parliamentary Democracy fame.

Sadly, I blew this opportunity – I was so lonely in London that I soon scurried back to the family hearth and then had 3-4 jobs (including, ironically, a couple in London) before landing an academic position back in the West of Scotland….  And I regret never establishing any personal link with Barbu – admittedly quite a private person in those days. As students we never knew of his background – we never asked, of course – but, as this vignette (which I discovered recently) indicates, he was not someone to flaunt his distinctive experience. 

Apparently he left Britain in 1973 – to take up a Professorial post in Brazil where he died in 1993 – somewhat marginalised it seems…....

However I’m glad to say that Barbu seems remembered in modern Romanian academia – with this 2015 intellectual biography and a 2014 tribute here (in Romanian)