Can outsiders ever understand what's going on in Romania?

An article and paper from a British consultant/hired gun about aspects of Romania’s judicial system has coincided with an explosive scandal here in Romania about tapes of conversations between anti-corruption agents, Prosecutors and the Secret Service apparently targeting for prosecution people, for example, who were getting under the skin of the previous President……

It got me reflecting for the first time for some years on what Francis Fukuyama called the “Getting to Denmark?” question – namely how long it takes a society to develop strong and reliable institutions of liberal democracy….. This will be a rather personal and disjointed post as I try to collect my thoughts...so forgive me.....I will try shortly to gather them more coherently...

My relationship with Romania goes back exactly 26 years – I arrived to heavy snow and dim lights in January 1991 and, for a week, was ferried to places such as Brasov and Alba Iulia in an ambulance (I was on a WHO assignment) to meet various dignitaries; subsequently travelling to and from Iasi in the East by train. 

In mid 1992 I took up a year’s assignment in the Prime Minister’s Office, working with the newly-elected big city mayors and the Ministry of the Interior to design the country’s first EC project of support for local government – during when I had discussions with several very senior politicians and officials and had a vague sense then of the iron fists and years of experience concealed in their gloves, eyes and voices.…

I was even one of a small number of foreign guests given seats of honour and a special mention at one of the first Conferences then of the renamed Social Democratic party (PSD) - which was all too quickly admitted to the Socialist International…This proved to be a useful network for some very skilful operators to use to pull the wool over Europe’s eyes about the dismal reality of reform efforts in the country in the 90s.

I remember vividly Ralf Dahrendorf’s judgement in 1991 that it would take at least a generation to make the beginnings of an impact on the communist mindset inculcated in central european countries for 50 years. But the European Commission knew differently and made a decision in 1997 which shocked me to the core – that EC technical assistance to central European and Balkan countries would no longer be governed by “developmental” objectives but rather by their ability to meet the formal legal requirement of the Acquis Commaunitaire (AC)…….ie of EU membership

It was obvious that the old power structures were still firmly in place but a break in the rule of ex-communists had taken place in 1996 when a liberal President was elected who sadly proved to be ineffective - and the old communist rule continued under Iliescu until sea captain and Bucharest ex-mayor Basescu took power in 2004. Only then can it be said that the reform of state agencies (slowly) started – very much under the eye of the EC…. Although the country was admitted (with Bulgaria) to the EU in 2007, its judicial performance (with BG's) caused sufficient concern to ensure that it was subject to continued monitoring under the terms of the Verification Mechanism. This continues....  

By then, however, the EC and EU strategy was simply to request Romania to observe the legal formalities of the AC;  and to set up and ape the institutions of old Europe (already started through “twinning” with appropriate agencies in member countries, in the last decade with the hundreds of millions of euros of EC Structural Funds managed entirely by Romania).

Tom Gallagher’s Romania and the European Union – how the weak vanquished the strong (2010) documents the sad results

Noone, it needs to be stressed, is an expert in the transition from communism to a system of liberal democracy – or whatever we want to call the European system. We need to be very clear about this….noone expected it the Wall to fall - the only remotely equivalent experience was the collapse in the 70s of the Iberian and Latin American dictatorships – so people like me had (slowly) to try to build up a new set of putative skills and capacities……with rather limited success as I try to explore in The Long Game – not the log-frame (2011)

 I can’t pretend to be an expert on Romania - since I returned only in 2009; have divided my time since then between Bulgaria and Romania; and don’t even speak the language…..

But, thanks to my Romanian partner, I did take part in workshops, for example, for Young Political Leaders led by American advisers who really shocked me for the disdain they showed for policy matters – everything was about political marketing….These, of course, were the days when everyone was preaching that the State should be dismantled….only in 1997 did the World Bank Annual Report grudgingly admit that they may have gone too far in their exhortations about privatisation…….  

Another memory I have of these days is the Head of the European Delegation (Karen Fogg 1993-98) who gave every consultant (like me) a summary of Robert Putnam’s Making Democracy Work – civic traditions in Italy (1993) which suggested that the "amoral familiasm” of southern Italian Regions had undermined their pretences at modernism and effectively placed them 300 years behind the northern regions.  Putnam indeed spawned an incredible technocratic literature on the concept of social capital and ideas on how it could be “engineered” to deal with the new alienation of modern capitalism..

Romanian communism 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, no one felt able to trust.

From 1990 the market became God; Reagan and Thatcher had glorified greed; the state was bad; and television – which had been limited by Ceaucescu to 2 hours a day - the great good……As the commercial stations and journals spread, the values of instant gratification became dominant.

The short pamphlet Fighting Corruption with Con Tricks- Romania’s Assault on Democracy  just produced by the Henry Jackson Society shows absolutely no understanding of any of this……..nor the scale of theft perpetrated by business - national and international. 

I want to be fair to this article and the 20-odd page pamphlet about the Romanian both of which I have read very carefully. I think he makes some very fair points …….What, however, is missing is any balance. The scale of the plunder carried out by Romanian businessmen and politicians challenged only by the establishment a few years ago of the anti-corruption agency is never mentioned - nor the scale of the the plunder and the role of the PSD in sustaining it….

And unlike this longer academic review of the Romanian judiciary published last year, Clark’s brief coverage of the communist period’s influence on the judiciary is used simply to tar the current system with communist methods….
Clark is not stupid – he must realise that in the heavily politicised Romanian context, his paper is going to be used to weaken the only agency which has been giving ordinary Romanians some hope that their country was at last making progress toward a system which held powerful people accountable……Nor am I naïve – I understand the power various secret agencies exert here over judicial and political figures…..but that requires us to be so very careful and balanced in what we write – not to give succour to the devious        

Those who really want to get a sense of the country can do a lot worse than clicking Mapping Romania - notes on an unfinished journey

Revolutionary Times??

For the past 2-3 months the Brits have found themselves discussing a constitutional issue - namely the scope of parliamentary power. For the British PM, “Brexit is Brexit”…..it is her government, she asserts, not parliament, which should make the formal request to the European Union to start the negotiations for withdrawal…

The relevant Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty says: “Any member state may decide to withdraw from the union in accordance with its own constitutional requirements.” But the UK’s constitution is unwritten and, therefore, contentious……..inevitably therefore some people took the government to (the High) court on the issue

The UK calls itself a “parliamentary democracy” but was judged by a senior Conservative Minister in 1976 to be more of an elective dictatorship – by virtue of the power Britain ‘s “first past the post” electoral system gave Prime Ministers. British Parliamentarians are generally “whipped” into support for “their” government (of whichever sort) and shows its independence only in times of crisis or when government whips cannot drum up the necessary numbers.

It was the narrowness of the votes which forced (a Labour) government into the first concession to a Scottish referendum (on the question of an elected Assembly in 1979) – although it was actually the third time that decade the device of a referendum had been used. The first - in 1973 – was one for Northern Ireland voters alone – one of no fewer than 8 localised referenda for different parts of the UK (inc in 1998 for London). The 1975 referendum seeking confirmation of the British membership of Europe which had been negotiated 2 years earlier was the country’s first UK-wide one and also the first time British Cabinet Ministers had been allowed a free vote.

Brexit was actually the eleventh referendum in British constitutional history but only the third which was open to all UK voters (The second UK-wide referendum was in 2011 - when a proposal for a system of proportional representation was soundly rejected…)

So a referendum is still a rarity in British constitutional practice……as such, its results are (and must be) highly prized……

The issue before the UK’s Supreme Court is simply whether government or parliament should trigger the request to Europe to withdraw. This is how a prominent public law specialist put it - 

The decision of the High Court in London (in November) was a ruling not on whether Brexit should happen, but on how it can happen lawfully. Some of the press coverage of the decision has been deplorable. There is nothing–nothing at all–in the court’s judgment to block the will of the people, to reverse the result of the referendum, or to get in the way of Brexit. Nor is there anything inappropriate in turning to the courts to determine how Brexit can proceed in accordance with the rule of law.

 To rule on such matters is emphatically the courts’ job. For 25 years I have been among the first to criticise judicial rulings that trespass into terrain better left to politicians and Parliament. But this is no such case. The court has done nothing improper and those who sit idly by whilst others who should know better castigate the judges for doing their job should be ashamed of themselves. We are a country that abides by the rule of law, and we should act like it.  

So the question is whether ministers can trigger the beginning of the UK’s formal departure from the European Union without further parliamentary enactment. The question is not whether ministers could conclude that process without further parliamentary enactment. (The answer to that question would clearly be no.)

In other words, the questions is not “does Parliament have to be involved in the Brexit process”. Of course Parliament has to be involved. The question is a much narrower one: “does Parliament have to be involved before the Brexit process may be formally commenced under Article 50?”.     

The Professor then goes on to argue that the High Court was actually wrong in its eventual judgement that it was parliament which had the right to trigger article 50.

A good friend of mine runs a website which exposes the manoeuvrings of what he calls the global nomenklatura and the deceit and silences of the corporate media. I have a lot of sympathy for his position – if not quite his same faith in direct democracy and “the people”

A couple of weeks ago he sent me an article he had written which excoriates those who dare challenge the thrust of Brexit. It contains a sentence which had me reeling -    

 “The Outcome of a referendum cannot at all be questioned by anyone – just as God’s word cannot be questioned” 

- which admirably captures the underlying thought process of Brexiters.

I see just three little problems with this statement –

- The result of the 1975 UK referendum was never accepted by eurosceptics whose subsequent and unceasing campaigning efforts eventually paid off after more than 40 years. The 2015 Scottish referendum result has not been accepted by Scottish nationalists and others….. Public debate never ends….so I don’t accept the view that those who continue to argue for “remain” have somehow lost their right of free expression. Indeed I find the vehemence of the campaign mounted by the popular press in Britain against judges and “remain” parliamentarians (for example) frightening and indeed dangerous in its utter lack of respect for (if not understanding of) democratic rights…..….The British system is one which, until now, has respected the rights of minorities since, one day, they too can become the majority….

- Britain’s “unwritten constitution” has placed parliament; the judiciary; and a neutral civil service at its core. I grant you that (a) parliament seems to have abrogated much of its authority (if not respect); (b) the judiciary’s deep class partiality has been successively exposed in judicial mistrials (such as The Birmingham Six; and Hillsborough); and (c) that the senior civil service has been heavily politicised in the past decade or so…..

But how ironic that it is the very Brexiters who talked about “parliamentary sovereignty” who are now objecting to parliament being given a voice in the withdrawal process….The main opposition party has made it clear that they support Brexit - but that the significantly different forms Brexit takes require parliamentary discussion and approval (or another referendum) of its precise shape.

- The third problem I have with the statement that the “people’s will is God’s will” is simply that most of us are at least agnostics, if not downright atheists – and even believers interpret God’s will in many different ways

The Guardian newspaper embodies the voice of the liberal elite and is, indeed, a paper I have been reading myself with increasing scepticism (respecting only journalists such as John Harris and Gary Younge) but this article had an important insight…

For decades, eurosceptics revered the UK’s unwritten constitution: its sovereign parliament, its independent judiciary, its neutral civil service. But an alternative centre of power - the people - has now been established. Rather than their loyalty to the constitution, institutions are now judged according to their loyalty to the demos (nearly half of whom voted to remain) ...

The elected Commons is no more respected. There is only one parliament that is currently guaranteed a say on the final Brexit deal - and it is not the British one. Brussels’ much-maligned MEPs, unlike MPs, are assured a vote.

Like past revolutionaires, the Brexiteers are seeking to remake national institutions in their own image. But as they contend with the biggest task facing any government since 1945, they may yet regret their dismissal of accumulated wisdom.

I have never been a friend of the mass media or the political class – this is the short piece (written by Anthony Jay of “Yes Minister”) which is the best expose of the Nomenklatura for me and which I always highlight in my continuing effort to make sense of the global crisis eg Dispatches to the post-capitalist generation (p70).

And this is the expose of the corporate media - Fraudcast News – written by Pat Chalmers who, for more than a decade, was part of the Reuters News system.

But I get worried when the rule of law gets ridiculed or trampled….It takes us back to the 1930s…..

The Slaves' Chorus

If you’re looking for a good read in this relaxed period after the New Year, let me recommend The Slave’s Chorus – the 2016 posts whose format I explained in this post a month ago

The title is a reference to the Brexit and Trump upsets – when the vox (and disgust) of the populi was loudly heard - and reminded me of the electrifying performance of Verdi’s opera of that name which I heard in the early 90s in Brno (Moravia). The way it was being sung sent shivers down my spine with its expression of the long pent-up frustration in the country……   

……I do the drive between Bucharest and Sofia fairly frequently and had interesting side trips to both Eastern and Western parts of the countries during the year which are duly recorded……as well as my artistic and wine experiences…….

A nice feature this year, I think, are the illustrations which, for the most part, are taken from my painting collection….and here is the book in more accessible format - https://issuu.com/ronaldyoung0/docs/the_slaves__chorus

John Berger - someone to look up to....

I feel John Berger’s death (at age 90) very personally since he has accompanied me for most of my life….I vividly remember his (black and white) television documentary in the early 1970s - Ways of seeing - whose very title indeed continues to echo in my head and has influenced my writing inrecent years. The book can be read here in full…..

He was a writer who used words to craft sensitive stories about both artists and peasants (he lived in a village in the Haute Savoie from 1974) but was, for me, at his most powerful in two books he wrote with the Swiss photographer Jean Mohr –

- A Fortunate Man (1967) which followed the life and travails of an English country doctor and which can be read in its entirety here

- A Seventh Man (1975) which looked at the fate of immigrants in post-war Europe….

His writing, like the man we saw in later interviews, was extraordinarily thoughtful – not for him the slick phrases which pass for most interviews these days. Words were magic and needed to be weighed carefully….I was amazed to find, as I googled for the Berger resource I have put together below, a virtual conversation Noam Chomsky had with him in 2014

A John Berger resource

http://www.newstatesman.com/culture/2015/06/i-think-dead-are-us-john-berger-88

http://www.drb.ie/new-books/a-fortunate-man

http://designobserver.com/feature/on-my-shelf-a-classic-by-berger-and-mohr/32608

http://www.drb.ie/essays/what-lies-behind

thesis on Berger https://lra.le.ac.uk/bitstream/2381/30264/1/U155538.pdf

the art of looking 2016 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_IeBcecwcQw

about time https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=USzGCdoLhjQ
https://lithub.com/why-look-at-art-when-you-could-watch-tv/

Romania's Socialist Realist tradition

My readers will know that I find art galleries the last bastion of civilisation – private galleries often offering the chance to chat; and well-structured public galleries the opportunity to think. 

Bucharest’s National Gallery gave me on Saturday such an opportunity – with its (first ever) post 1989 exhibition of Romanian Socialist Realism - Art for the people 1948-1965 ? – which will run through to the spring….

….A nicely-presented Catalogue (of 300 pages) accompanies the exhibition and is, for the first time for the Gallery, bilingual and well-priced (13 euros).

I have today selected more than 70 of the reproductions for this flickr album 

Bulgaria and Romania may be neighbours but have rather different experiences of the communist period - with Bulgarian communism having a strong presence at the start of the century and a horrific killing period marking the Bulgarian takeover which started in September 1944. Romania, on the other hand, is reckoned to have had only about 1000 members of the communist party when the Red Army rolled in and the communist takeover took therefore some 3 years before they could officially take over...

The two countries also tend, very sadly, to pretend that the other doesn’t exist – whether in matters of culture or wine……the Danube certainly does seem to act as a bit of a geopolitical barrier (both physical and mental) but Bulgaria stole a bit of an edge on its larger neighbour last year with an  exhibition on the subject – building on one it held as far back as 2002 about the paintings of the 1980s which languish neglected and forgotten in the archives of Sofia City Gallery…(I have its superb catalogue)

And I was remiss in not writing about the autumn exhibition Afternoon of an Ideology in Sofia’s City Gallery about the communist period and painting during this period - which attracted this great blogpost from a young Bulgarian.

Thanks God it's Friday

I have, for the past month or so, been looking over the year’s posts - with a view to compiling a little E-book which allows both their chronological presentation and some reflections on their significance (if any). I first tried this last year and titled the result In Praise of Doubt – a blogger’s year – although it had a double bonus in starting with some posts from the previous year and finishing with a “sceptic’s glossary” whose provocative definitions deserve a higher profile and are therefore added to the 2016 edition which I hope to publish in a few days – running at the moment with the title The Slaves’ Chorus  …...

This is my 8^th year of blogging – at their height, posts averaged one every 2 days….now they average one a week – arguably a more appropriate period for disciplined thinking and writing than the 24 hour frame…..Indeed one of my favourite bloggers - The Archdruid Report - sticks (religiously) to a weekly schedule ….

I try to avoid mainstream media, preferring more marginal writing - so was prepared for the outcomes of the British referendum and the American elections. But the Brexit vote in particular was like a kick in the stomach…. ..my EU citizenship, after all, gives me more significant freedoms (to travel and reside) than does my British citizenship…. Almost a third of the posts dealt with these 2 issues….

As befits a blog whose title refers to two mountain ranges another third of posts deal with my (generally very pleasant) experiences of living in Bulgaria and Romania – particularly experiences relating to art and wine……

The final bunch of posts have more miscellaneous topics, generally occasioned by my reading….. or viewing (documentaries have been an important discovery for me this past year). Indeed I seemed to find books less gripping this past twelve months – only seven made sufficient impact to inspire a post -

 Worldly Philosopher: The Odyssey of Albert O. Hirschman 

Austerity – the history of a dangerous idea

In Europe’s shadow: two Cold Wars and a thirty-year journey through Romania and beyond (2016)

Blimey – it could be BREXIT ! 

Post Capitalism -   a  Guide to our Future 

How to Run a Government

How will Capitalism End? - a summary of whose basic thesis can be found in this 2014 New Left Review article

Recommended Blogs

All blogs have a “blogroll” – many of which are outdated. I try to keep mine up to date

A few of the good ones send me automatic updates – generally the collective sites such as Eurozine journal, RSA and the Real World Economist blogs; the great Scottish Review E-journal; and one single blogger How to Save the World. Those which deserve a special mention include –
- Poemas del rio Wang - the most amazing site which tends to focus on memories of old central and east European lands; which runs some trips to them; but whose current series is on Iran
- That’s How the Light Gets In – the imaginative site of a retired Liverpudlian Polytechnic lecturer with strong cultural tastes
 - Michael Roberts blog - an elegantly written Marxist economist blog
- Stumbling and Mumbling - a rather academic blog with, however, good hyperlinks 
- Britain is no Country for Older Men – an informative (if rather sexist) blog which celebrates the life achievements of various unsung heroes

The painting is a recent acquisition – one of Plamen Todorov’s dreamlike sequences……

Romania's "progressive politics" on show once again

I haven’t posted about Romanian politics for more than a year but - with parliamentary elections on December 11 removing the technocratic government created in the aftermath of the November 2015 series of scandals which had hit the ruling “social democratic” party – it seems an appropriate time to try to update readers about the situation here in Romania.    

Last November this is how I described things -

Romanian politicians don’t do resignations. When, a few years back, one of their previous Ministers who had migrated to Brussels as a Euro MP was one of three Euro MPs to be caught in a sting, the other two quickly resigned but not Romanian Adrian Severin…..

When Victor Ponta became Romania’s Prime Minister some 4 years ago, he was almost immediately discovered by a global scientific journal to have committed extensive plagiarism for his PhD. He shrugged that off – although it had immediately led to resignations of German and other national Ministers guilty of such transgressions. But not in Romania…..Even being indicted by the country’s powerful anti-corruption brigade (DNA) didn’t seem to rattle him – only one of the charges would have been liable to remove him.

 But Ponta duly went (pushed it appears) in November 2015 as public anger at political shamelessness reached boiling point - first from the death of a police outrider escorting a Ministry of Interior’s car which had no right for such protection but then, at the weekend, from almost 50 deaths in a night-club which, like all such places in the country, had absolutely no fire or safety precautions……The “Sarah in Romania” blog can always be relied upon for a caustic comment on such matters – ….

This time their seems some focus for policy change to the anger….the country now has a President (Klaus Johannis) who has used at least the language of radical change - although the jury must remain out on whether he has the capacity to deliver. And the street protests - which were normally led by a party political element - look this time to have a slightly more hopeful base in the citizens……but so-called “civil society” (about which one does not hear so much these days) has never really taken off in Romania – despite the extensive funding it got from external sources…..

Despite my own social democratic credentials, I have never been a fan of the Romanian PSD party which, for me, immediately absorbed the Ceaucescu lineage into a distinctive soup of social democratic rhetoric and finance capitalist reality. Tom Gallagher expressed it best when he used “Theft of a State” as the title of his book on post 1989 politics in the country.

The most physical expression you can find of the extent to which the apparatchiks still have their claws in everything is by checking in each city you visit the large mansions in prime areas which have the various party insignia designating them as party possessions…..

Hundreds of politicians are now in jail and it is entirely significant that the current PDS leader is on a 2-year suspended prison sentence for electoral fraud – occurred when the party tried to impeach the country’s President…..

With considerable reluctance, he seems to have accepted that this prevents him from assuming the position of Prime Minister but has just executed what he considers a brilliant move by nominating an unknown Muslim woman instead.............whose name. however, has just been rejected by the President on what are thought to be security grounds .(he husband is a pro-Assad Syrian activist).... Talk about being too clever by half........this is just playing with the country!!

In May 2016 the local elections put this totally corrupt party back into power in most of the country’s urban centres. Early December saw less than a 40% turnout in the parliamentary elections but the PSD took almost half of the vote and the majority of the seats…..They now control almost everything in Romania except the Presidency and the judiciary and are already making vague threats against both……

One of the few English=speaking blogs is Bucharest Life (of which I’m no great fan) but their updates are worth looking at

Blogging as a giving account of one's life

I notice that I am not the only person who reflects on the year’s blogging experience. Chris Grey is an organisational theorist who started a blog to accompany his fascinating book A Very Short Fairly Interesting and Reasonably Cheap book about studying organisations – and has a post identifying some of the year’s themes (as well as readership stats)

I particularly liked the description of his working method - 

I also try to include in each post copious links to a wide variety of media sources and, to a lesser extent, academic works. I don’t know how many readers follow these links but at any rate I feel better-informed as a result of digging around to find them.

Typically, I think of a topic on Friday morning, ponder it during the day and write the post on Friday evening (yes, my life really is that exciting). Most posts take two to three hours to research and write.

I’ve been blogging since 2009, with a resignation from a major project in China I was leading in 2010 leading to a slow withdrawal from the paid labour front and giving me more time to enjoy the stretch of country between the Carpathians (where I summer) and the Balkans (where I winter) and to read, write……and muse…..

And last year I collected the year’s posts, put them in chronological order and wrote both a Preface and Introduction for In Praise of Doubt – a blogger’s year which tried to answer such questions why anyone should be bothered to read my material – and also why some of us have developed this blogging habit -

My claim for the reader’s attention is simply expressed – 

·       experience in a variety of sectors (and countries) – each closely manned with “gatekeepers” whose language and rules act to exclude us

·       the compulsion (from some 50 years), to record what I felt were the lessons of each experience in short papers

·       Long and extensive reading

·       A “voice” which has been honed by the necessity of speaking clearly to audiences of different nationalities and class

·       intensive trawling of the internet for wide range of writing

·       notes kept of the most important of those readings

·       shared in hyperlinks with readers

I confess somewhere to an aversion to those writers (so many!) who try to pretend they have a unique perspective on an issue and whose discordant babble make the world such a difficult place to understand. I look instead for work which, as google puts it, builds on the shoulders of others……my role in a team is that of the resource person….who finds and shares material….

Perhaps my father’s hand is evident in the format and discipline of the blogpost – he was a Presbyterian Minister who would, every Saturday evening, take himself off to his study to anguish over his weekly sermon which he would duly deliver from the pulpit the next morning……Arguably indeed the dedication given these past 7 years to the blog is a form of “giving of account” or justification of one’s life!!  I have grown to appreciate the discipline involved in marshalling one’s thoughts around a theme (in my father’s case it was a biblical quotation).

I rather like the format of a blogpost of some 700 words (at most a couple of pages). Management guru Charles Handy famously said that he had learned to put his thoughts in 450 words as a result of the “Thought for the Day” BBC programme to which he was a great contributor.

For me a post written 4-5 years ago is every bit as good as (perhaps better than) yesterday’s - but the construction of blogs permits only the most recent posts to be shown. A book format, on the other hand, requires that we begin……at the beginning ... It also challenges the author to reflect more critically on the coherence of his thinking ……. 

The photo is of a new Bekhiarov I acquired this week (with, lower, the first one I bought from this great BG realist) - both from the great Absinthe water colour gallery in Sofia where I found this week a wonderful 400 page catalogue of the International Watercolour Society's 2016 exhibition in Varna - with a superb global collection. This is their 2013 catalogue

TINA – and the little Trumpets

In the 1980s, Margaret Thatcher introduced us to TINA – her refrain being that “there is no alternative” (to the liberalisation of national and global markets).

Social democratic parties bought into that argument and have shown no inclination to rethink policies since the global crisis began almost a decade ago. Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour party, I grant you, is one exception – but has attracted vitriolic attack on the basis that there can be no going back to the world of the 1960s and 1970s.

The argument generally consists of the following elements -

- The state can’t get out of the immense debt which it has taken on by rescuing the banks

- Although the operations of privatisated industries are subject to increasing attack, the idea of reprivatisation is rarely presented in social democratic programmes

- The ideology of greed has become so legitimised, lives so atomised and the commodification trend so strong that notions of collective and cooperative effort seem more and more unrealistic

- We can’t stop automation

- Only eccentrics question the worship of growth

Much wailing and gnashing of teeth in the social democratic camp has so far produced little to convince - let alone inspire - people that a feasible programme exists which could attract electoral support. This short 2015 Compass article and book Rebuilding social democracy – core principles of the centre left ed Keven Hickson (2016) give a fair sense of both the mood and policy drift…….

Of course, convincing programmes need to be based on a sound story…..about what exactly has been going on in the post-war period? It’s clearly not enough simply to blame neo-liberalism,,,,,

This week I watched one of the best narratives I have so far come across - Global Trumpism – presented by Mark Blyth, author of Austerity – history of a dangerous idea which I wrote about earlier in the year.

Blyth’s style of historical ideas, colloquial language and slides is a gripping one which puts other economists into the shade….

His starting point is the growth of populism throughout Europe and now the States and the question whether (as I tended to suggest in one blogpost on Brexit) it is a reaction to immigration trends and fears – or has a more basic economic explanation…. He shows how the location of Brexit and Trump supporters correlates with the devastation caused by globalisation and recent Chinese imports; job insecurity et al - but then uses the largely unknown figure of Michael Kalecki to show how the post-war Keynesian consensus unravelled in the 1970s

Kalecki had warned as far back as 1943 of a central flaw in the Keynes’ model – which duly presented itself in the 1970s with the arrival of serious inflation which was dealt with by first monetarist and then neo-liberal policies. The post-war regime slowly gave way to one of secular disinflation; capital assertiveness; global markets; strong central banks; and weak trade unions and parliament

As befits a political economist, Blyth wants to know about losers and winners – none of this cosy nonsense about equilibrium….and uses Branko Milanovic’s slide of global trends in income distribution showing the shape of an elephant to back up his argument about global trumpism….

He returns, finally, to his initial point in exploring the various economic options we seem to have –

- The sort of spending on infrastructure which Trump’s campaign envisaged? (probable but not with anticipated results)

- the return of “good jobs”? (unlikely)

- getting corporations and the rich to pay more tax (“fat chance”!)

- “technological disruption” (the digital disruption has already happened)

All in all a really thought-provoking presentation……from a Professor of Political Economy - a dsicipline which hopefully will be finding a deserved place for itself after almost a century of neglect…….

A Problem of Identity

A recent post criticised “political labelling” but ducked the perfectly legitimate question of the descriptor someone with my set of values and commitments might find more acceptable. 

I object to being called a “leftist” simply because, the label carries the connotation that I favour state power - and I am a firm believer that “power corrupts” and always needs an institutional challenge and balance….“The Open Society and its Enemies” was in the early 1960s one of the key books which influenced me….

So, in my book, central state power needs to be balanced with citizen power - properly served by five other systems –

- strong parliaments;

- strong municipalities;

- diversely independent media;

- independent judicial systems; and

- real structures of accountability.

Parse most European systems and it’s only the northern ones which come through positively from any ratings….the British one certainly doesn’t fare well….

And excesses of economic power should be dealt with not only by appropriate structures of anti-monopoly legislation but by the encouragement (via laws and funding) of cooperatives and worker participation. 

“Balance” is the key…and that is achieved by state actions which draw from what we might call the “Acton” toolkit (in honour of the English Lord’s quip about “absolute power corrupting absolutely”).

England is perhaps unfairly termed “perfidious” since the “balance of power” principle it pursued for so long served Europe well…..and is one which deserves more honour as a serving ideology for our times…..That’s why I was so taken with Henry Mintzberg when, in 2000, he started to use the term “rebalancing society”. I have always admired the German system.....

My father was, in the 1950s, part of a group of local dignitaries who used the label “moderate” or "progressive" when they fought in the municipal elections – neither left nor right….interestingly they faced not only Conservatives and Labour but an increasingly vociferous groups of liberals…….If “Progress” had not got such a bad name recently, I might be tempted to use the term “progressive” of myself….. 

I am an “agnostic” in matters of religion and “sceptic” vis-à-vis anything which passes for conventional wisdom or arouses new enthusiasms (hence my distrust of the “identity politics” of the past few decades) – but these terms don’t do justice to the values I hold of equality, fairness, openness and challenge….   

So help me!! What am I?

The painting is one of Alex Ivanov's (Romanian despite his name) whose book illustrations can sometimes be seen at the Military circle galleries.. Th is one of three I am proud to have in my (comparatively small) collection of Romanian paintings.. 

Update; A book on “Britain and Transnational Progressivism” https://books.google.bg/books?id=tawYDAAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false gives an fascinating picture of the progressive strand in, for example, the West of Scotland in the late 19^th and early 20^th century

The charm of wine boutiques!

Markets are fascinating things – whether it's farmers harvesting and distilling grapes and distributing the bottled product to supermarkets and wine boutiques – or artists crafting their materials to delight us in galleries with their canvasses or sculptures. All the choices to be made – and the different activities and roles involved in bringing such things as wines and paintings together with customers and clients. ........Since a cycling trip through France as a teenager, I’ve always appreciated wines – but been happy until recently to settle for whatever was available cheaply in the nearest shop…

Bulgaria has made me more aware first of the scale of artistic endeavor – the annotated list of Bulgarian artists in the latest edition of Bulgarian Realists is now almost 300 (without even starting to give serious consideration to contemporary artists!) – and, now, of the scale and variety of its wines… ..

But it’s been a gradual process of learning about its wines - ever since the first stunning taste of a Targovishte Muscat at Balcik in 2002 - on our way back from a trip to the Aegean!

What has helped my education, of course, are the annual wine fairs here in Sofia – with more than 70 Bulgarian vineyards offering a sample of their wares….almost 500….and the lovely little annual catalogue of Bulgarian Wine which gives notes on a sample of those vineyards......But all that can be a bit overwhelming….

So I’ve been delighted to find these days that young Assen’s Vinoorendo has been joined by no fewer than 3 other wine shops - first Rumen’s Winebar 52, Alabin St where we had a lovely evening last week tasting 5 of the Santa Maria selection – for 5 euros

Then I stumbled across Tempus Vini at 81, Tsar Boris – open just 2 months ago and Kallin always poised with an open bottle to welcome us.

And yesterday morning I noticed Enjoy Wine 19, Ivan Shishman st - whose Ivo welcomed us not only with amusing quips but with a couple of tastings. 

Most of Kallin’s wine stock is Bulgarian – and the same is true of Enjoy Wine (which organizes not only wine tastings but trips to vineyards)

If you have money, it’s not difficult to part with it in such places – as the owners share their information and passion for the various bottles on offer!

While googling about the idea of wine markets, I came across this superb blog by a Prof of Political Economy who clearly takes his wines seriously – while making the whole subject of the wine market fascinating…..