European public space

I’m European in perhaps a rather perverse sense – that I love the differences between the countries which make it up. Given the scale of EU activities (let alone EC programmes – such as Erasmus) which bring together officials, academics, students across national boundaries, you would have thought there would have been a market for journals and books to help ease the cross-cultural dialogues taking place. But I’ve mentioned several times on this blog (for example here; here; and here) how few titles there are (at least in the English language) dedicated to deepen mutual understanding of each other’s cultures and ways of doing things.

I referred in the last post some of the British books which try to do this. And it would be an interesting exercise for a national of each EU member state to make a similar list of material available in their respective language!! I would exclude from those lists the conventional country histories which are written by the various country specialists at Universities – largely on the ground that they are not written for the purpose I have mentioned.      

Of course, there are the pop books which reduce it all to tongue-in-cheek stereotypes – for example We, The Europeans - or the Xenophobe series. Some of this stuff can actually be quite insightful – for example, this good expose of the phrases we Brits use; what our European partners generally understand them; and what they really mean by them 

At the opposite extreme, are those who try to understand cultures using comparative sociology for example Geert Hofstede and Frans Trompenaars. Richard D Lewis’s When Cultures Collide – leading across Cultures  (1996) is perhaps the most readable treatment.

In my days, we had the magazine Encounter (Der Monat in Germany) which gave me stimulating articles by renowned French, German and Italian writers, for example, but was then discovered to have been funded by the CIA. Where its equivalent these days? Le Monde Diplomatique and Lettre International perhaps - except there is, sadly, no English version of the latter - and only a short version in English of the former (whose language is, in any event, a bit opaque) 

In 2004 Carl Fredrikkson wrote an article about the need for a proper European public space where ideas were exchanged across national boundaries and Jan-Werner Muller returned to the issue earlier this year with an important article entitled The Failure of European Intellectuals? in which he argued that

Up until the 1930s at least, there existed a genuine European Republic of Letters, in which writers and philosophers engaged with each other easily across national borders – and in which they also explained other national cultures to their readers. And, in a somewhat different vein, it continued, at least for a while, after the Second World War, when the imperative of reconciliation loomed large. Figures like Alfred Grosser and Joseph Rovan explained the French and the Germans to each other. These weren't just glorified apologists for national quirks, or mediators who would quietly disappear when rapprochement was complete: they had standing in their own right. But, effectively, they did perform the role of sophisticated culturaltranslators and political mediators.

And now? One might be forgiven for thinking that the more Europe integrates politically, legally and economically, the more provincial and inward-looking its individual nation-states become culturally. Easyjet and the Eurovision song contest are not a substitute for a Republic of Letters, where intellectuals have a genuine feel for at least two or three different European cultures. Of course, there are exceptions: Eurozine http://www.eurozine.com/ is one of the major websites where Europeans can learn about the debates taking place in other countries (and, not least, about how intellectuals in other countries perceive their neighbours).

There is no panacea, as far as creating a genuinely European public sphere is concerned. One can only hope that individuals will become more curious, more willing to see the rewards in the work of translation and mediation. It might seem all very humdrum – but it is actually an urgent task, not only, but especially at this critical juncture. To take an obvious example: Germans (and other "northerners") need to understand the history of the Greek civil war, the ways the Greek state was used to pacify a deeply polarized society, and the way European money served to create a middle class which helped parties stay in power, but also diminished the dangers of renewed social conflict (none of this is an excuse for corruption and a generally dysfunctional state – tout comprendre ce n'est pas tout pardonner).

Conversely, it would be helpful if observers outside Germany got a grip on the particular strand of liberal economics that has been animating policy-making in both Bonn and Berlin for a long time: that strange thing called Ordoliberalismus, whose representatives conceived of themselves as the real "neoliberals" – liberals who had learnt the lessons of the Great Depression and the rise of dictatorships in the twentieth-century, and who precisely did not want to equate liberalism with laissez-faire. For them, soi-disant neoliberals like Ludwig von Mises were simply "paleoliberals" who remained stuck in nineteenth-century orthodoxies about self-correcting markets. The German neoliberals, on the other hand, wanted a strong state able and willing not only to provide a framework for markets and society, but also to intervene in the former for the sake of ensuring competition and "discipline".

Again, an understanding of such ideas is not the same as accepting them (with Ordoliberalismus, in particular, there are good reasons to be suspicious of its illiberal, perhaps even authoritarian side). The point is that a more productive and sophisticated debate cannot ignore the profoundly different national starting points for thinking about politics (and economics, of course). In that sense, what I have called clarifiers and the mutual explicators of national traditions need to work together. 

Perry Anderson is one of the few Anglo-Saxons with such knowledge and skills. Muller himself is a great example

The painting is a recent one by a good Bulgarian friend of mine - Yassen Gollev     

Missing intellectual fare

Where do we go for a journal which speaks to the increasing number of people who are alienated from politics, corporate power and the media; who want more than empty slogans; and who are keen to read well-written pieces by those whose reading is extensive enough to make them aware of their own limitations?

Not to newspapers whose deadlines make the required quality of writing and scope of reading impossible – although Le Monde and Die Zeit (a weekly) try hard. 
Sensible people go to the New York. London and Dublin Reviews of Books. While preparing this post, I came across this helpful list of the 50 “best literary” journals but they are American and limited to magazines judged to be literary. The Nation makes the cut but, for some reason, The New Republic and The Boston Review don’t. Not literary enough?

Over the past few years, I have several times commented on the lamentable choices for those of us looking for deep, non-partisan and well-written coverage of key issues facing Europeans. In 2011 I talked about “gated communities” 

The barrier to our understanding of development in other European countries is not just linguistic. It stems also from the intellectual compartmentalisation (or apartheid) which universities and European networks have encouraged in our elites. European political scientists, for example, have excellent networks but talk in a highly specialised language about recondite topics which they publish in inaccessible language in inaccessible journals. What insights they have about each other’s countries are rarely made available to the wider public. The same is true of the civil service nationals who participate in EC comitology or OECD networks – let alone the myriad professional networks. We talk about gated communities – but they exist virtually as well as physically.

In 2012 a blogpost talked of a “european failure of knowledge management” and blamed journalists - although it is clearly publishers who are at fault. Later that same year a post tried to express the need more clearly 

In my days, we had the magazine Encounter (Der Monat in Germany) which gave me stimulating articles by renowned French, German and Italian writers, for example, but was then discovered to have been funded by the CIA and soon folded. Where is its equivalent these days? Le Monde Diplomatique and Lettre International perhaps - except there is, sadly, no English version of the latter - and only a short version in English of the former (whose language is, in any event, a bit opaque).
In 2004 Carl Fredrikkson wrote an article about the need for a proper European public space where ideas were exchanged across national boundaries and Jan-Werner Muller returned to the issue earlier this year with an important article entitled The Failure of European Intellectuals?But I am actually asking for something simpler - clear and insightful writing about different European societies. The recent publication on The Inner lives of Cultures could give us only one European system!

 And, at the beginning of this year, a post entitled Indifference to European Differences posed a simple question

there are tens of thousands of journalists and academics churning out articles in (hundreds of) thousands of journals in the general field of politics and social policy. Can we not think of a way of making the better of these pieces more accessible - in various European languages?? That's the Eurozine concept - but they're selecting from a rather precious bunch of cultural magazines whose language doesn't take many prisoners!
One of the factors which gets in the way of even this simple idea is the specialisation of political, professional and academic silos - just have a look at the lists of academic magazines at publishers such as Elsevier,Sage or Wiley. Twenty- odd years ago journals such as Parliamentary Affairs, Political Quarterly, West European Politics and Government and Opposition offered civilised reading. Now, with the exception of Political Quarterly, you get highly specialised  topics with boring technocratic prose.

Of course, the weekly Courrier International and Project Syndicate bring us syndicated pieces from around the world – but these are from newspapers and therefore suffer from superficiality.

Perhaps I’ve been missing something….I google “lists” and come up with an interesting table of about 150 political magazines covering key countries. But nothing I didn’t already know.

By the way, the current edition Government and Opposition – on The Power of Finance - can be downloaded free – article by article (until mid-August). And the journal Governance does have a useful blog which picks out worthwhile articles.

I liked the way the original editors of The Nation expressed its philosophy way back in 1835

The Nation will not be the organ of any party, sect, or body. It will, on the contrary, make an earnest effort to bring to the discussion of political and social questions a really critical spirit, and to wage war upon the vices of violence, exaggeration, and misrepresentation by which so much of the political writing of the day is marred.

But where is the political equivalent of Granta?

Trouble Ahead

Like an underwater volcano, a big issue has been simmering away for some time and arguably showed its first sign of life with the judgement a few weeks ago of the Polish Supreme Court that Polish law trumps European. The issue is the power and legitimacy of the European Court of Justice.

We are told that, in these days of pooled sovereignty in matters, for example, of trade and defence, the question of national sovereignty is of marginal significance - if not an outdated notion. But here I agree very much with the picture painted by the conservative philosopher John Gray who is now in charge of book reviews in the leftist “The New Statesman” 

Brexit was a revolt against globalisation. Asserting the state against the global market is in Brexit’s DNA. Thatcherites swallowed a mythical picture of the European Union as being hostile to the free market—the same picture that befuddles much of the left.

In reality the EU is now a neoliberal project. Immune to the meddlesome interventions of democratically accountable national governments, a continent-wide single market in labour and goods is hardwired to preclude socialism and undermine social democracy. 

Large numbers of voters in the UK favour nationalising public utilities and firms such as the Tata steel plant while supporting stiffer penalties for law-breakers and strict border controls. “Left-wing” economics and “right wing” policies on crime and immigration are not at odds. Both come from a concern with social cohesion. If there is a centre ground in British politics, this is it.

Old Labour occupied much of this space. But it is almost unthinkable that any senior Labour figure should attempt to do so nowadays. 

Almost a year ago, no less a figure than Perry Anderson trained his large cannon on the technocratic core of the European Union – with a trilogy of essays amounting to a full-size book - starting with a 20,000 word essay entitled The European Coup followed by Ever Closer Union

The second of these looks at the origins and practices of the different institutions within the European Union – arguing powerfully that they breach every principle of the rule of law. A useful summary is here. 

And, this week, another major figure – German Wolfgang Streeck in a short article for Brave New Europe – has applied that general critique to the EU’s handling of the challenge from Hungary and Poland. It’s an explosive article – which starts thus 

Strange things are happening in Brussels, and getting stranger by the day. The European Union (EU), a potential superstate beholden to a staggering democratic deficit, is preparing to punish two of its democratic member states and their elected governments, along with the citizens who elected them, for what it considers a democratic deficit.

For its part, the EU is governed by an unelected technocracy, by a constitution devoid of people and consisting of a series of unintelligible international treaties, by rulings handed down by an international court, the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU), as well as by a parliament that is not allowed to legislate and knows no opposition. Moreover, treaties cannot be reviewed in practice and rulings can only be reviewed by the Court itself. 

The current issue is an old one, but it has long been avoided, in the best tradition of the European Union, so as not to wake sleeping dogs. To what extent does “European” law, made by national governments meeting behind closed doors in the European Council and elaborated in the secret chambers of the ECJU, trump national law passed by the democratic member states of the European Union? The answer seems obvious to simple minds unversed in EU affairs: where, and only where, the member states, in accordance with the terms of the Treaties (written with a capital T in Brussels presumably to indicate their sublime nature), have conferred on the EU the right to legislate in a way that is binding on all of them….. 

It was a young Netherlands historian – Luuk van Middelaar (speechwriter for a few tears of the EU’s first elected President von Rompuy) – who let the cat out of the bag in The Passage to Europe (2013) about what he called the “coup” that gave the European Court of Justice its supreme powers in the 1960s. And that was indeed the starting point for Anderson’s essay on The European Coup. Streeck’s article continues - 

Already in the early 1960s the CJEU discovered in the Treaties the general supremacy of EU law over national law. Note at a glance that nothing similar is to be found in the Treaties; one needs to be a member of the Court to observe that supremacy. At first, insofar as the jurisdiction of the European Union was still very limited, nobody seemed to care about this. Subsequently, however, as the European Union set about opening up national economies to the ‘four freedoms’ of the single market and then introducing the common currency, the doctrine of the primacy of European law operated as an effective device for extending the Union’s authority without the need to rewrite the Treaties, especially as this became increasingly difficult with the increase in Member States from six to, pre-Brexit, 28.

What was initially no more than a highly selective upward transfer of national sovereignty gradually became the main institutional driver for what was termed ‘integration by right’, which was carried out by the Union’s central authorities and co-administered by various coalitions of member states and governments. 

Streeck then moves on to make the same point as Albena Azmanova does in last weekend’s Binding the Guardians report which I’ve discussed in the most recent posts – namely that a lot of EU countries are in breach of the rule of law. 

As far as corruption is concerned, Poland is generally considered a clean country (Hungary less so), while countries such as Romania, Bulgaria, Slovenia, Slovakia and Malta are widely known as bastions of business cronyism and venality, not to mention, in some cases, the deep-rooted mistreatment of their minorities.

Indeed, both Slovakia and Malta have recently witnessed the murder of independent journalists, perpetrated by criminal groups connected to their respective government circles, involved in investigations related to cases of high-level corruption. Yet no one threatens to cut off European subsidies to these countries, while the liberal European press carefully refrains from comparing the Polish or Hungarian “rule of law” with those of Slovakia and Malta.

There is reason to believe that this is the case because, unlike Poland and Hungary, both countries pay back by always voting in favour of the European Commission and otherwise keeping their mouths shut. Similarly, political influence over the high courts of a given country is something that EU bodies have good reason not to make too much of a fuss about: where Constitutional Courts exist, they are all without exception and in one way or another politicised. 

Michel Barnier shocked everyone when he put a marker down for French sovereignty which Streeck suggests could help put an end to the relentless push for European integration 

The battle in Poland and Hungary may put an end to the era in which “integration by right”, thanks to its incrementalism, could be treated by increasingly short-sighted national governments with benevolent neglect. For example, some centrist French politicians set to contest next year’s presidential elections, such as Valérié Pécresse (Les Republicaines), Arnaud Montebourg (ex-Socialist) and even Michel Barnier, the combative Brexit negotiator, have begun to show their concern for what they now call French “legal sovereignty”, with some of them, including surprisingly the latter, demanding a national referendum to establish once and for all the supremacy of French law over European law. 

And Streeck concludes with an interesting comment on the real purpose behind the multi billion EC Recovery Fund 

The real purpose of the recovery fund – to keep national elites in power in Eastern Europe committed to the internal market and averse to any kind of alliance with Russia or China – is too sensitive to talk about in public. So it must be shown that money buys something higher than imperial stability: submission to Western European cultural leadership as documented by the selection of leaders to the taste of its elites.

Will Poland and Hungary learn to behave like Romania or Bulgaria, or even like Malta and Slovakia, and thus placate their enemies in Brussels? If they refuse to do so and the CJEU has the last word, another moment of truth may present itself, this time with an Eastern twist. 

Merkel, during her final hours as chancellor, urged the EU to exercise restraint and try a political rather than a legal solution. (Merkel may well have been informed by the United States that it would not look kindly on Poland, its strongest and most loyal anti-Russian ally in Eastern Europe, leaving the EU, where it is fed by the EU so that it can be armed by the US power).

In this context, note that there now seems to be a slow realisation in other member states of the sheer presumptuousness of the EU’s increasingly explicit insistence on the general primacy of its law over that of its member states.

Indifference to our European Neighbours

A post in September last year drew attention to the scandalously superficial treatment which Europeans get of their neighbours. Michael Lewis’s detailed articles (in Vanity Fair) on German, Greek and Irish aspects of the global financial crisis a few years back was an exception which proved the rule. The London Review of Books (belying its name) is about the only publication which gives us in depth coverage of issues and (occasionally) countries. 
France and Germany, whose traditions would lead you to expect such intelligent treatment of other societies, disappoint - despite Die Zeit, for example, being a weekly, with the additional liberty that offers.
In desperation I have now added New Left Review and a new-look New Statesman to the list of journals which now wend their way to my mountain retreat. Already I feel a difference!! 
Time perhaps to revise the assumption about non-intellectual Brits? 

And also to ask a simple question - there are tens of thousands of journalists and academics churning out articles in (hundreds of) thousands of journals in the general field of politics and social policy. Can we not think of a way of making the better of these pieces more accessible - in various European languages?? That's the Eurozine concept - but they're selecting from a rather precious bunch of cultural magazines whose language doesn't take many prisoners! 
There are a few other titles which are trying this idea - eg Project Syndicate but from a rather narrow ideological base ; and Le Courrier International which gives us articles from a variety of (global) newspapers - but these ARE newspaper articles and suffer from the limitations of that genre. 
Time for more experimentation!

One of the factors which gets in the way of even this simple idea is the specialisation of political, professional and academic silos - just have a look at the lists of academic magazines at publishers such as Elsevier,Sage or Wiley. Twenty- odd years ago journals such as Parliamentary Affairs, Political Quarterly, West European Politics and Government and Opposition offered civilised reading. Now, with the exception of Political Quarterly, you get highly specialised  topics with boring technocratic prose.

 On June 24 2012 I wrote 

In my days, we had the magazine Encounter (Der Monat in Germany) which gave me stimulating articles by renowned French, German and Italian writers, for example, but was then discovered to have been funded by the CIA and soon folded. Where is its equivalent these days? Le Monde Diplomatique and Lettre International perhaps - except there is, sadly, no English version of the latter - and only a short version in English of the former (whose language is, in any event, a bit opaque). 

In 2004 Carl Fredrikkson wrote an article about the need for a proper European public space where ideas were exchanged across national boundaries and Jan-Werner Muller returned to the issue earlier this year with an important article entitled The Failure of European Intellectuals?

But I am actually asking for something simpler - clear and insightful writing about different European societies. The recent publication on The Inner lives of Cultures could give us only one European system!

We need to talk about…… “The State”

We need to talk about….the State. Or at least about the “machinery of government” about whose operations I am most familiar – in local and regional government in Scotland from 1968-90 and then in local and national systems of government in some 10 countries of central Europe and central Asia from 1991-2012.

Terminology is admittedly confusing….my first love, for example, was “public administration” since, at one fell swoop in 1968 I became both a Lecturer (officially in Economics) and a locally-elected reformist politician. From the start, I saw a lot wrong with how “public services” impacted on people in the West of Scotland – and I strongly associated with the national reform efforts which got underway from 1966, targeting both local and national systems of government and administration.

Major reforms of the “Civil Service” and of English and Scottish systems of local government were duly enacted – and I duly found myself in a powerful position from the mid 1970s to 1990 to influence strategic change in Europe’s largest Regional authority  

But, by the late 70s, national debate focused on “state overload” and on “ungovernability” and the discourse of private sector management was beginning to take over government.

The 80s may have seen a debate in UK left-wing circles about both the nature of “the local state” and the nature and power of “The State” generally but it was privatization which was driving the agenda by then.  “Public Administration” quickly became “public management” and then “New Public Management”….

Indeed by the 90s the debate was about the respective roles of state, market and society. Come 1997 and even the World Bank recognized that the undermining of the role of the State had gone too far.

But it has taken a long time for voices such as Ha-Joon Chang and Marianna Mazzucato to get leverage……and the space to be given for talk about a positive role for the “public sector”.

In the meantime talk of “platform capitalism”, the P2P “commons” and automation confuses most of us… and the last remnants of European social democratic parties have, with a couple of exceptions, totally collapsed. So do we simply give up on the idea of constructing a State which has some chance of working for the average Joe and Jill?

Because I’m a bit of a geek, I’ve long followed the discussion about Public Admin Reform and PMR…..trying to make sense of it all – initially for myself….but also for those I was working with….For the past 40 years I have been driven to draft and publish – after every “project” or intervention - a reflective piece…..

It’s only now that I feel I am beginning to understand some of them…..particularly those I wrote  a decade or so ago about the possibilities of reform systems of power and government in central Asia…

And then a British book about “the attack on the state” provoked me into identifying some questions about this huge literature which academics hog to themselves - but which need to be put out in the public domain. I found myself putting the questions in a table and drafting answers in the style required by the fascinating series such as “A Very Short Introduction” or “A very short, fairly interesting and reasonably priced book about….”, 

The State (at both local and national levels) is a constellation of diverse interests and power – to which we can give (rather arbitrarily) such terms as  “public”, “professional”, “party”, “commercial” or “security”. But, the questions begin…..

- In what sense can we say that something called the state exists?

- What can realistically be said about the interests which find expression in “the state”?

- How does each particular public service (eg health, education) work?

- How satisfied are citizens with the outcomes of state activities?

- Why is the state such a contested idea?

- Where can we find out about the efficiency and effectiveness of public services?

- Where can we find rigorous assessments of how well the “machinery of government” works?

- What Lessons have people drawn from all the “reform” experience?

- How do countries compare internationally in the performance of their public services ?

- Has privatisation lived up to its hype?

- what alternatives are there to state and private provision?

- why do governments still spend mega bucks on consultants?

- do Think Tanks have anything useful to contribute to the debate?

- whose voices are worth listening to?

- What challenges does the State face?                            

- If we want to improve the way a public service operates, are there any “golden rules”?

The next post will try to present a table which addresses these questions – with all the hyperlinks which my readers now expect……

Sexy Regulations

It was somewhere in Central Europe (or was it Central Asia?) in the late 1990s where I first encountered the phrase “Regulatory impact”….Those were the days when the State and its activities was a thing of scorn, when state controls were being dismantled and the language of “deregulation” was at its height….”Regulatory impact analysis” at best was a tool to help that process – although it was sometimes a reluctant concession to the obstinate fact that regulations actually had positive social effects…..

At some stage, the discourse actually moved onto that of the “Regulatory State” – and my mountain shelves indeed have a (n essentially untouched) 2003 book of that title – The British Regulatory State; high modernism and hyper-innovation - by the sadly deceased Michael Moran which this 2011 paper called The Odyssey of the Regulatory State may help me understand.

So Anthony Barnett was not exactly alone when he confessed last summer that he had only recently realized the significance of regulations to the European Union which, he further argues, were by no means as badly perceived by significant sections of the British public as the Brexiteers had initially argued…..  Indeed the Brexit campaign had to tone down that part of their message…..

Grenfell Tower stands as a witness to the consequence of permissive deregulation. As the fridge caught fire in Flat 16 of the fourth floor of Grenfell Tower on the 14 June 2017, it sucked a whirlwind of inadequate, flawed, ill-enforced regulation and cuts in fire-brigade risk assessment and enforcement, into a murderous inferno. It was nothing to do with the EU but it would never have happened had the EU set the UK’s building standards and their implementation.

The result is that people want there to be regulations. In a remarkable article drawing  on a  research and polling by IPPR Marley Morris analysed how, historically, the call for deregulation was a keynote of the anti-EU campaigns and the creation of anti-EU sentiment. In 2013, freeing British business from “excessive regulation” was singled out by then Prime Minister David Cameron, as one of his main aims, when he announced the party’s commitment to renegotiate the UK’s relationship with the EU and then call a referendum. The EU could not concede. As the referendum approached the Leave side was justifiably accused of seeking to strip the public of such regulations as the Working Time Directive, which limits hours of work. Then their polling and focus groups reported that such de-regulation was very unpopular. So the Leave campaign dropped its call. Morris explains,
 “The root cause of this shift was simply that there was – and indeed still is – no public appetite for a deregulatory agenda. Our own polling with Opinium has found widespread public support for some of the most controversial EU-derived employment, environmental and financial legislation… Renewable energy targets – another bugbear of earlier Eurosceptics – are endorsed or considered too low by 74 per cent… more than 80 per cent of the public are opposed to lowering food safety standards. When confronted with this wall of public opinion, it is no surprise that leave campaigners adapted their position as the referendum date neared”.

The anti-EU campaign is one of the strangest on record. It began by demanding an end to European regulation while increasing trade with the EU. Its triumph has led it to embrace less trade with the EU while retaining its level of regulation! When it comes to 80% you can’t argue with “the people’s will”. Or as Theresa May put it in har Mansion House speech that Johnson praises but ignores, in "areas like workers’ rights or the environment, the EU should be confident that we will not engage in a race to the bottom in the standards and protections we set. There is no serious political constituency in the UK which would support this – quite the opposite".

Barnett’s article focuses on a 2007 book The Rise of the Unelected – Democracy and the new Separation of Power by Frank Vibert which I had come across but not given particular attention to…..Barnett wants to know why the significance of regulation for the EU hasn’t been properly recognised.....

Routledge have just published a densely researched Handbook on Brexit edited by Patrick Diamond, Peter Nedergaard and Ben Rosamond. It has 23 scholarly articles and aims to set out a “systematic academic overview” of the Brexit process. They encompass the special character of the British state, the English and Irish questions, the role of the city of London, the flaws of the EU and the need to rethink theories of its nature. But regulation only figures as an aspect of financial policy for the City of London.

The respected Centre for European Reform published a 50 page overview of how to Relaunch the EU in November last year. It is sober, thorough and addresses the need to make the EU more responsive. But it does not mention regulation or the need to make this accountable. The arguments that Vibert has developed remain peripheral to mainstream thinking.

Few British citizens understand the “deal” which has been struck with the EU – references in particular to the “single market” and to the “customs union” utterly confuse and I therefore think  Barnett may be both right and wrong. British people do think that parliamentary sovereignty is important; and that the expert rule embodied in EC regulations has gone too far. Barnett continues….

Shortly after Open Europe, which is directed by Brexit-supporting Henry Newman who once worked for Michael Gove, published Striking a Balance, a report that recommends an across-the-board agreement on these lines. Its justification: “The EU is our most important goods’ market and the most highly-regulated sectors – electrical, automobiles, and chemicals – are the areas which we trade most with the EU and are growing the fastest”. Unlike Boris Johnson, Brexiteers who study the evidence want the UK to be in the Single Market for goods. The government will apply “to stay in the European standards system for industry products and services”.

It is easy enough to ask, as we should, what, then, is the point of Brexit? Another good question is whether the EU will agree to the request. I want to ask why even passionate Brexiteers now see no way out of the EU’s regulated space, certainly in traded goods. The crux of the answer is that that there is no way out of regulation.
By regulation I don’t just mean high profile financial regulation. I mean its ongoing, background role in ensuring the quality of the air we breathe, the medicines we take, the food we consume and the safety of the flights we board. You could undertake the enormous costs of building custom checks for goods going between the UK from the EU. But what is the point, if you then have to recreate and duplicate inside the UK the entire apparatus of regulations, with their ongoing autonomy from parliamentary 'sovereignty'?

The idea that once the UK left the EU Britain could ‘do away’ with regulation from Brussels, because it is mostly unnecessary, has proven to be an utter fantasy. Britain’s wannabe Donald Trump, Nigel Farage, told the BBC, “we will finish up perhaps in an even worse place than we are now because we won’t be free to de-regulate”. But no modern democracy would wish to deregulate. It is not the road to freedom. And as the UK government is learning, public opinion will not let it deregulate. This is a fundamental lesson of Brexit.
 The lesson is related to, but goes further than, Will Davis's notable response to the referendum result in 2016. Drawing on David Graeber's "The Utopia of Rules", Davis emphasised that in an important way "capitalism is regulation" and concluded that the ideology of Brexit is illusory.
In the UK, these dire, Brexit-times have bred impatience, shallowness and lack of reflection. I want to resist these and examine an activity which may seem petty and irritating but isn’t.

Balkans basket-case

I find it astonishing that I learn more about the Greek crisis from an article in the US Vanity Fair than in any serious British journal or blog. And what a story it is.

In just the past decade the wage bill of the Greek public sector has doubled, in real terms—and that number doesn’t take into account the bribes collected by public officials. The average government job pays almost three times the average private-sector job. The national railroad has annual revenues of 100 million euros against an annual wage bill of 400 million, plus 300 million euros in other expenses. The average state railroad employee earns 65,000 euros a year. Twenty years ago a successful businessman turned minister of finance named Stefanos Manos pointed out that it would be cheaper to put all Greece’s rail passengers into taxicabs: it’s still true. “We have a railroad company which is bankrupt beyond comprehension,” Manos put it to me. “And yet there isn’t a single private company in Greece with that kind of average pay.” The Greek public-school system is the site of breathtaking inefficiency: one of the lowest-ranked systems in Europe, it nonetheless employs four times as many teachers per pupil as the highest-ranked, Finland’s. Greeks who send their children to public schools simply assume that they will need to hire private tutors to make sure they actually learn something. There are three government-owned defense companies: together they have billions of euros in debts, and mounting losses. The retirement age for Greek jobs classified as “arduous” is as early as 55 for men and 50 for women. As this is also the moment when the state begins to shovel out generous pensions, more than 600 Greek professions somehow managed to get themselves classified as arduous: hairdressers, radio announcers, waiters, musicians, and on and on and on. The Greek public health-care system spends far more on supplies than the European average—and it is not uncommon, several Greeks tell me, to see nurses and doctors leaving the job with their arms filled with paper towels and diapers and whatever else they can plunder from the supply closets.
“The Greek people never learned to pay their taxes .... because no one is ever punished. It’s like a gentleman not opening a door for a lady.”
Where waste ends and theft begins almost doesn’t matter; the one masks and thus enables the other. It’s simply assumed, for instance, that anyone who is working for the government is meant to be bribed. People who go to public health clinics assume they will need to bribe doctors to actually take care of them. Government ministers who have spent their lives in public service emerge from office able to afford multi-million-dollar mansions and two or three country homes. Oddly enough, the financiers in Greece remain more or less beyond reproach. They never ceased to be anything but sleepy old commercial bankers. Virtually alone among Europe’s bankers, they did not buy U.S. subprime-backed bonds, or leverage themselves to the hilt, or pay themselves huge sums of money. The biggest problem the banks had was that they had lent roughly 30 billion euros to the Greek government—where it was stolen or squandered. In Greece the banks didn’t sink the country. The country sank the banks.
The author interviews 2 tax inspectors who were punished for whistle-blowing – the first just took it for granted that I knew that the only Greeks who paid their taxes were the ones who could not avoid doing so—the salaried employees of corporations, who had their taxes withheld from their paychecks. The vast economy of self-employed workers—everyone from doctors to the guys who ran the kiosks that sold the International Herald Tribune—cheated (one big reason why Greece has the highest percentage of self-employed workers of any European country). “It’s become a cultural trait,” he said. “The Greek people never learned to pay their taxes. And they never did because no one is punished. No one has ever been punished. It’s a cavalier offense—like a gentleman not opening a door for a lady.” The scale of Greek tax cheating was at least as incredible as its scope: an estimated two-thirds of Greek doctors reported incomes under 12,000 euros a year—which meant, because incomes below that amount weren’t taxable, that even plastic surgeons making millions a year paid no tax at all. The problem wasn’t the law—there was a law on the books that made it a jailable offense to cheat the government out of more than 150,000 euros—but its enforcement. “If the law was enforced,” the tax collector said, “every doctor in Greece would be in jail.” I laughed, and he gave me a stare. “I am completely serious.” One reason no one is ever prosecuted—apart from the fact that prosecution would seem arbitrary, as everyone is doing it—is that the Greek courts take up to 15 years to resolve tax cases. “The one who does not want to pay, and who gets caught, just goes to court,” he says. The easiest way to cheat on one’s taxes was to insist on being paid in cash, and fail to provide a receipt for services. The easiest way to launder cash was to buy real estate. Conveniently for the black market—and alone among European countries—Greece has no working national land registry. “You have to know where the guy bought the land—the address—to trace it back to him,” says the collector. “And even then it’s all handwritten and hard to decipher.” But, I say, if some plastic surgeon takes a million in cash, buys a plot on a Greek island, and builds himself a villa, there would be other records—say, building permits. “The people who give the building permits don’t inform the Treasury,” says the tax collector. In the apparently not-so-rare cases where the tax cheat gets caught, he can simply bribe the tax collector and be done with it. There are, of course, laws against tax collectors’ accepting bribes, explained the collector, “but if you get caught, it can take seven or eight years to get prosecuted. So in practice no one bothers.” The systematic lying about one’s income had led the Greek government to rely increasingly on taxes harder to evade: real-estate and sales taxes. Real estate is taxed by formula—to take the tax collectors out of the equation—which generates a so-called “objective value” for each home. The boom in the Greek economy over the last decade caused the actual prices at which property changed hands to far outstrip the computer-driven appraisals. Given higher actual sales prices, the formula is meant to ratchet upward. The typical Greek citizen responded to the problem by not reporting the price at which the sale took place, but instead reporting a phony price—which usually happened to be the same low number at which the dated formula had appraised it. If the buyer took out a loan to buy the house, he took out a loan for the objective value and paid the difference in cash, or with a black-market loan. As a result the “objective values” grotesquely understate the actual land values. Astonishingly, it’s widely believed that all 300 members of the Greek Parliament declare the real value of their houses to be the computer-generated objective value. Or, as both the tax collector and a local real-estate agent put it to me, “every single member of the Greek Parliament is lying to evade taxes.”
The Greek state was not just corrupt but also corrupting. Once you saw how it worked you could understand a phenomenon which otherwise made no sense at all: the difficulty Greek people have saying a kind word about one another. Individual Greeks are delightful: funny, warm, smart, and good company. I left two dozen interviews saying to myself, “What great people!” They do not share the sentiment about one another: the hardest thing to do in Greece is to get one Greek to compliment another behind his back. No success of any kind is regarded without suspicion. Everyone is pretty sure everyone is cheating on his taxes, or bribing politicians, or taking bribes, or lying about the value of his real estate. And this total absence of faith in one another is self-reinforcing. The epidemic of lying and cheating and stealing makes any sort of civic life impossible; the collapse of civic life only encourages more lying, cheating, and stealing. Lacking faith in one another, they fall back on themselves and their families. The structure of the Greek economy is collectivist, but the country, in spirit, is the opposite of a collective. Its real structure is every man for himself. Into this system investors had poured hundreds of billions of dollars. And the credit boom had pushed the country over the edge, into total moral collapse.

And space does not allow me to excerpt what the author has to say about how even the Greek monks (on the Athos peninsula) were sucked into the cauldron of corruption.
There are perhaps 3 issues from such a story - one for the Greeks themselves and others in the Balkans; about how a country can be brought to its knees in such a way and how it can get off its knees. All credit to the new government and its Finance Minister that they were determined from the very beginning to be so transparent about the scale of the fiscal lying and cheating they found.
The second issue is the role of the European Union - where it was in all this in the last 2 decades. And the final issue is the poverty of foreign reporting in Britain - that it has to be an American journalist to write such an exposure. Only the academic Perry Anderson has written such insightful stuff about various European countries - in London Review of Books and New Left Review.
The painting is Bosch's The Ship of Fools,

Alternatives....how the media could actually help the development of the good society

I’m encouraged by two new discussion initiatives just announced by The Guardian – the first promises to 

….. investigate real-world examples of people doing things differently. We’ll meet councillors who are extending local government far beyond collecting the bins; housing activists turning themselves into property developers; and energy bosses who actually ask customers how their companies should be run. Much of the reporting will be from Britain, but we’ll also look at other parts of Europe (including Germany) and further afield.Stack them all together and the grand lie of Thatcherism is exposed. There are alternatives. We can do things differently.

The opening piece skewers what passes for political and economic debate in Britain – 

With Britain already having suffered one lost decade, a murmuring catastrophism has set in among our intellectuals. Mainstream-left politics remains stuck between two cliches. Either: well, we used to do things differently (cue sepia-tinted nostalgia for the establishment of the NHS and huge public borrowing). Or: the Germans do it, and it’s done them no harm (along with wistfulness for a proper industrial policy)

The New series is, sadly, not very easy to find but can be accessed here. I've tried unsuccessfully to  register for updates so each time have to try to remember the title (The Alternatives) and search for it - a pity since this article on social investments is a great example of the sort of information the mainstream media doesn't gives us and which many of us thirst after.....
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The second initiative broadens the focus to Europe as a whole, with Natalie Nougayrède promising

……it would build bridges and engage more closely with readers throughout Europe and those in the wider world who want to keep in touch with European concerns. We know people across Europe are eager to share insights about a region whose destiny is currently being redefined. We want to offer them the space and opportunity to do that.

The first of the series can be read here.
The Guardian has tried at such a venture at least once before – with the support of Le Monde and Der Spiegel as I remember but it seems to have gone down like a lead balloon. Language seems to trap at least the anglo-saxons very much in our own intellectual concerns and bubbles. I had the idea recently of trying to plug into the French and German blogging community to try to find some people there who might be willing to share with us some of the books and debates which have excited their attention in recent years - offering my own annotated list in exchange Our Future – an annotated bibliography.
But I simply can't navigate my way through the european blogosphere to the gems which must be there and asked for help. The one reply I received referenced the Social Europe website and the sadly dead Zygmund Baumont (who wasn't a blogger).

Perry Anderson is about the only character with the linguistic ability to supply us Brits with extensive analyses of post-war and contemporary debates in France, Germany and Italy. His stunning study The New Old World (2009) can be read in its entirety here (all 560 pages) and is easily the best read on what it is to be European – about a third being a survey of the literature on the “European Project”; another third being insightful and acerbic analyses of the political and intellectual currents of the “Core” European countries (with the noticeable and dismissive exclusion of the UK); and the final section (“The Eastern Question”) devoted largely to Turkey.

Of course we have excellent studies of individual European nations – particularly France, Italy and Spain. ” How the French Think – an affectionate portrait of an intellectual people” is just the latest in a line which includes Theodor Zeldin and Rod Kedward. 

And writers such as Peter Watson, Simon Winder and Neil Mc Gregor have ensured that even books about Germany have been making the lists of best-sellers  

I’m not sure, however, if I would go so far as US intellectual Mark Lilla who wrote recently -Ever since Madame de Staël wrote “De l’Allemagne” during Napoleon’s reign to celebrate the Germans as sensitive romantics allergic to tyranny (unlike the French), and Heinrich Heine responded with his own “De l’Allemagne” portraying them as brutal pagans capable of anything, Europeans have been trying to unlock the cultural codes of their neighbours—and, in so doing, unlock their own.

Lilla seems to be the only US writer interested in exploring strands of European thinking and gave a very helpful picture recently of some developments on the centre-right of French social thought – particularly amongst the younger bourgeois catholics who tend to read Le Point magazine - which I’ve just discovered has the astonishing circulation figure of 400,000. This is some six times the British equivalent – proof if it was ever needed of the greater intellectuality of the French….

It would be interesting to know what books (if any) British visitors to European countries (whether for business or pleasure) use for their preparation – apart from the obvious travel books.

A few years ago I prepared this source book - German Musings – which would be of interest to anyone visiting that country…..