a powerful Interview in Revista 22

Dorel Sandor is a name to conjure with in Romania….

I first met him some 25 years ago when he had just started his career as an independent policy consultant which morphed into that of a respected political commentator….

Less visible these days on television perhaps than a decade or so ago, Sandor has just given an interview in Revista 22 which some Romanians may feel is selling their country short. As, however, I've posted only once this year about Romania and his analysis will strike chords with many of my readers who are from other European countries as well as the US, Ukraine and Russia......I’m going to try to summarise the main points of the interview – but blame Google Translate for the inevitable mistakes which will occur…….

First, however, let’s set the context for the 98% of my readers who are not Romanian…..
The end of next year will see the 30^th anniversary of the fall of the Ceausescu regime but few Romanians have any reason to celebrate. Four million of their best and brightest have, for example, emigrated – and most of its industries, agriculture and woodlands sold to foreigners.

Romania joined the EU in 2007 and, for a time, it seemed, was making progress in judicial reform where it is still (like Bulgaria) subject to the constraints of an annual monitoring system. The sentencing of a Prime Minister to jail-time led to what appeared to be open season being declared on senior politicians and businessmen (corruption was so systemic that it was difficult to distinguish the two).

Accusations about partiality were brushed aside initially but evidence slowly began to accumulate first of suspiciously high conviction rates and, more seriously, collusion between prosecutors and the (still extensive) security services…..Traian Basescu the maverick liberal President (from 2004-2014) had appointed in 2006 a young woman Laura Kovosi as Prosecutor General who found herself and the service under increasing fire from various high-profile scandals from 2016. In December of that year, the Social Democratic party came to power and tried to use the scandals to muzzle the Prosecution service and indeed to change the criminal law. Extensive street protests have marked the regime ever since….  

The Sandor Interview

starts by emphasising how wrong it is to talk of a Romanian "revolution" in 1989/90 – it was just a reshuffling of positions - and creation of opportunities for a Mafia-type takeover of financial assets.. 

“The great secret of post-communism is that those who fed, sustained and exploited it did not want it to have democracy, market economy, free press, civil society, but to put money on the factories, plants, resources. And here begins the metastasis of Romania for the past 30 years. At present, parliament is a collection of nonentites, people fleeing immunity with no idea of what is happening in Romania”.

Indeed, he suggests that there are no more than a dozen decent individuals in Parliament – and 2 worthwhile trade union leaders. He is highly critical of NGOs and the media…..”empty shells”….

He is particularly scathing of the passive consumerist culture which now has a grip on the country 

“Nowadays, the plague that destroys 30-40 year-olds and children is mobile phone, laptop and Facebook. Now, when the baby comes out of the mother's belly, she puts the phone in her mouth and sees what is delivered to her screen, so she does not have any personal experience and she's eating information from commercial companies. Communism and capitalism have been replaced by vulgar consumerism And the phone, the laptop, the computer, Facebook and the TV are sources of substitution for the collective personal identity and the world we live in.

On the street, I see mothers with a baby in their arms talking on two phones. Or children for a few years who sit and look at the computer screen. 80% of people are prisoners of the screen. It's a plague. This is one of the main factors that peacefully breaks down, soft liberation, collective and individual thinking…….. The human species is in a very serious anthropological deadlock. It is in the global trend. We, being a poorer, more primitive country, are lagging behind in this pathology. So it's an incredible collective plague”.

And has clearly given up on politics – 

“The stark reality is now that we do not have political parties any more. The Romanian political environment is in fact an ensemble of ordinary gangs that try to survive the process and jail and eventually save their wealth in the country or abroad. That's all! Romania has no rulers. It has mobsters in buildings with signs that say "The Ministry of Fish that Blooms".

Hungary and Poland are currently the focus of serious European concern simply because Brussels has given up on Romania 

“In Poland and Hungary things are working. They have preserved their internal authority, they want to lead them, according to market standards, and they are naughty. But these are two countries that function and want to function in their traditional, authoritarian way, with pride. And to them is nationalism, but it is a nationalism that has consistency.

While there is no such thing in us. However, there are relevant things that happen there in the economy, in investments. And they violate the rules for personal and personal interest, but not in the way we do. It is a gap between the level at which we have fallen below elementary standards and them.

One of the reasons why the EU is not too concerned about us is that it is that they reckon that you can only reform a driver with a car that works. We are a two-wheeled wagon and two horses, a chaotic space, broken into pieces. What's to reform? So it's a big difference.”

Is Romania therefore “finished” – as Sandor claims? 
If anyone can deal with this question, it is Alina Mungiu-Pippidi - a prolific and high profile Romanian academic/social activist (with a base for the past few years in the Hertie School of Government in Berlin) who has been trying to understand Romanian political culture and the wider issue of corruption for the past 2 decades. In 2006 she contributed a chapter on “Fatalistic political cultures” to a book on Democracy and Political Culture in East Europe. In this she argued (a) that it was too easy for people (not least the political elite themselves!) to use the writings of Samuel Huntington to write Balkan countries off; and (b) that we really did need to look more closely at what various surveys (such as The World Values Survey) showed before jumping to conclusions….In 2007 she gave us even more insights into the Romanian culture in Hijacked modernisation - Romanian political culture in the 20^th century 

But what can people do when a system is so broken? Talk of the "democratic will" seems meaningless....Few people understand how the Italian system has been able to survive - but at least it had the liquid resources to keep its people happy.....The stark truth is that, after 30 years, Romanians live in a state of anomie and with none of the social trust or solidarity which allows some European countries to survive - however insidiously neo-liberalism is destroying even these...... 

Revisiting a neglected management classic

Just before this blog went silent in early August, I had written an important post distinguishing 5 very different “theories of change” ....wondering why so few mutual links had been made by the practitioners of the 5 "schools". I now realise I may have missed the most important school of all – that of “managing change”
Whenever the issue of change comes up, I rarely miss the chance to plug a book which was published in 2000 - Change the World by a management theorist Robert Quinn.

It stood out from the huge mass of books about managing change I had been reading in the late 1990s for its explanation of why so many change efforts fail – offering a typology (and critique) of four different strategies – “telling”, “selling”, “participating” and “transforming” – and daring to pose the challenging question of how individuals such as Gandhi, Luther King, Jesus Christ came to inspire millions…..

Virtually all books on managing change until then were (and most remain) what I would call “mechanistic” – offering apparently neutral tools of the sort consultants claiming objectivity can use. Quinn dares to introduce a moral tone – which both management writers and practitioners find a bit embarrassing. Their very legitimacy, after all, rests on the claims they make to scientific authority…..

This is perhaps why most of his writing passes under our radar. The same fate overtook Robert Greenleaf whose books on “stewardship” are so valuable……

A European audience does recoil a bit when they see the sub-title of Quinn’s Change the World, “how ordinary people can accomplish extraordinary results” – even if such hyping is a well-known US habit….His book then proceeds to offer 8 injunctions for those who aspire to be change-agents, some of which may offer challenges to the translator – the summary I offer in the middle column is from my memory of a book which is almost 20 years old. Since then, our view of the world has been hugely upset – not least by the social movements since then; by the 2008 global financial crisis; and by more recent books such as Reinventing Organisations by Frederic Laloux - my final column offers some preliminary and terse comments on how the injunctions have withstood the test of time ….

Quinn’s 8 Injunctions for changing the world (2000 )

Quinn Injunction	What one reader thinks he means	Fit with mainstream and newer literature
“Envisage the Productive Community”	Imagine how the system would work if we treated one another generously - Don’t be satisfied with second-best	Laloux has a lot to say about this
“First Look Within”	Set your own standards of excellence – don’t go with the mob	The self is very much back in fashion
“Embrace the Hypocritical Self”	Be aware of your own double standards	Still worthwhile
“Transcend Fear”	We always feel a pressure to conform and fear the consequences of appearing different	Ditto
“embody a Vision of the Common Good”	Don’t be afraid to demonstrate behavior consistent with what your ethical sense tells you	Laloux and the whole solidarity ethic much stronger these days
Disturb the system		20 years on, we probably have too much of this now!
“Surrender to the Emergent Process	Events can never be controlled – so let go	Chaos theory also back in fashion
“Entice Through Moral Power”	As above	See Laloux

“Change the World” is actually one of a trilogy Quinn has written – the first being “Deep change” – and the final one “Building the Bridge as you Walk on it – a guide for leading change” (2004) an outline of whose basic argument can be found here. 

Although I often reference Quinn, this is the first time I have written at length about him and notice a tinge of defensiveness as I reflect on his message……which perhaps sometimes smacks of “motherhood and apple pie”. He writes here about how the responses he received from his first book were the inspiration for the third - 

They defied what is written in almost all textbooks on management and leadership… common understanding and practice….. suggesting that every one of us has the capacity to transform our organizations into more positive, productive communities. Yet it is a painful answer that almost no one wants to hear. That is why it is not in the books on management and leadership. Painful answers have no market. The man states: “I know it all happened because I confronted my own insecurity, selfishness, and lack of courage.”

In the early 1990s I would look for copies of Stephen Covey’s The Seven Habits of really effective People which had been translated into the language of the country I was working in – partly to ensure that we had a common frame of reference but mainly because of its encouragement of what I considered to be useful ethical practices….. 

  Robert Quinn is still writing - not least on a blog the positive organization - although I suspect he has fallen prey to what happens to most gurus……they end up as egocentrics on egotrips……

I wold hope to update the July table in a future post.....

More reading on social and organisational change

Supporting small steps – a rough guide for developmental professionals (Manning; OECD 2015)

A Governance Practitioner’s Notebook – alternative ideas and approaches (Whaites et al OECD 2015)

People, Politics and Change - building communications strategy for governance reform (World Bank 2011)

Governance Reform under Real-World Conditions – citizens, stakeholders and Voice (World Bank 2008)

Change Here! Managing change to improve local services (Audit Commission 2001)

chapter 6 of In Transit – notes on good governance (1999) 

https://nomadron.blogspot.com/2018/07/i-have-little-list_10.html

a Robert Quinn resource

http://business.unr.edu/faculty/simmonsb/badm720/actchange.pdf
https://keithdwalker.ca/wp-content/summaries/1-c/ChangeTheWorld.Quinn.EBS.pdf

https://learningforward.org/docs/jsd-fall-2001/quinn224.pdf?sfvrsn=2 

Building the Bridge as you walk on it – a guide for leading change; Robert Quinn (2004) With “Change the World”, one of my all-time favourites. Before attempting the entire book, you might find this summary useful; as well as this excerpt from the first chapter

Chaos Looms - How Brexit impacts on an individual

I’ve been in Scotland this past week – looking for a place to spend winters not least to put some of my personal affairs in order before Britain separates from the Continent. Talk in recent negotiations of a “transition period” had made many of us imagine that time was still on our side but the past week seems to have seen a hardening of positions and an increasingly cavalier (if not positive) attitude by British conservative parliamentarians to the idea of “No Deal”  with the EU.

This raises the very real possibility that the UK will drop out of the EU on 29 March next year. Clearly there are no contingency plans in place to allow such a development – and a fairly immediate result will be total chaos.

Mutual agreements have not been made with the European Aviation Body which manages landing slots – nor with relevant customs and food authorities to ensure the flow of containers at borders. For example, it appears that nothing less than 95% of vets who operate in food production in the UK are EU nationals (British vets prefer to work with pets) and a lot of the EU nationals are leaving the country

One of the foremost commentators on the issue puts it like this - 

No-deal is probably the most demented policy put forward by mainstream British politicians in the modern era. To see how it would work in practice, this piece looks at what would happen on day one. Doing this for the whole economy would take countless pages of Stephen-King-style horror, so it's stripped down to one topic: food. This is the story of how our system for importing and exporting food implodes almost instantly.

You may remember 'Brexit means Brexit' - that nursery rhyme from the bygone days of late 2016. It was false. But no-deal, on the other hand, really does mean no-deal. The withdrawal treaty comes as one package, so if Theresa May fails to secure it, everything falls down. There are no deals on anything.
March 30th 2019 becomes Year Zero. Overnight, British meat products cannot be imported into the EU. To bring these types of goods in, they have to come from a country with an approved national body whose facilities have been certified by the EU. But there has been no deal, so there's no approval.

There’s more discussion of the issue at the excellent Brexit Blog. And the EU Referendum blog gives a great daily commentary on the whole withdrawal process. Its author, Richard North, may have been one of the original Brexiteers but his analysis of government ineptitudes and shallow media reporting is essential reading...... 

I’ve organised a nice flat but now have to contemplate making a trip in late March rather than April/May to ensure I’m able to enter Romania while I’m still a European citizen…..I was planning to drive to Scotland (and back) but have to reconsider that in the light of the nightmares which might face me as I try to cross the various borders (although my number plate is Romanian!)

While I’ve been here, I’ve been reading Tim Shipman’s Fall Out – a year of political mayhem which tells the detailed story of political events in the UK from the immediate aftermath of the June 23 2016 Referendum until the end of December 2017 – including the General Election which was suddenly called in April 2017. It is a frightening story of myopia and. manoeuvring

Update; 
in the absence of any national strategy to deal with the implications of a No-Deal scenario, local municipalities have been preparing their own.....with horrific results

a Brexit summer reading list 

October -
Why Britain is never prepared
British Ministers hadn't a clue about negotiations with the EU

Why Those seeking systemic change have had little traction….so far

I’ve been looking back at the posts which have this year discussed various efforts to improve “the human lot” and trying to draw the threads together……

One of the recurring themes of this blog is the “insularity” of those who theorise about social conditions ie their failure to realise that they are (generally) writing from one particular intellectual “silo” and aiming their missive at those within the same silo….

It’s taken me some time to realise that I’m guilty of the same sin….Let me explain…..

When I started this blog almost ten years ago, its initial focus was what we might call the “conditions of social injustice” in the West of Scotland in the 1970s which had persuaded some of us to elaborate a unique urban social strategy whose legacy is still evident today….

The blog then fairly quickly moved to try to explore the sort of reform strategy which might be appropriate for government agencies “in transit” from a system of total state control (under communism) to one with a strange mixture of “Wild-West”/Mafia capitalism and of loose democratic contestability…

At the same time, I was following the “development literature” in which the historical context (or path dependency) had been - not communism but – imperialism…The past decade – as a recent post summarised – has seen multiple challenges to the development model which had held sway in the post-war period…..with a much more political model of change penetrating even to the World Bank citadels of power

And, in recent years, the blog’s focus has shifted yet again – this time scouring the critical literature (which has grown massively in the past decade) about the “global economic crisis” and trying to identify some common ground in the various explanations on offer for the meltdown and their implications for the future of the prevailing economic model. Critical voices have increasingly been heard of that model – although alternatives are still in short supply

In each case, theories of change were needed and were duly produced – with varying degrees of coherence. The best of this literature is probably the World Bank material on government reform; and that from the 3 bodies listed in the “global justice” section – particularly the material from Smart CSOs with its three levels of forces of power – “culture”, “regimes” and “niches”

As always, a table will make the point more graphically than text –

How different “theories of change” have dealt with some key issues

Focus	The issue?	Key analysts	Narrative
Urban Social injustice	How marginalised groups and areas could improve their political influence	Saul Alinsky Peter Marris	Urban ghettoes were rediscovered in the 1980s and various methods used by governments to empower their residents….no real answer has been found to the problem of labelling and stigma….
National governance (communist legacy)	How to make state bodies effective and accountable to  citizens	Nick Manning Tony Verheijen	Fast privatisation (not least of media empires) has created new patrimonial regimes impervious to citizen control. European Structural Funds have deepened the corruption.
National governance (imperialist legacy)	reducing patrimonial power	Robert Chambers Duncan Green Matt Andrews Tom Carrothers	Global aid and consultancy is a massive multi-billion industry which seems impossible to reform. Fashionable nostra come and go – with the local regimes firmly in control….
Managing the Capitalist Crisis	Ecological collapse, peak oil, low profitability, corporate theft, globalisation	The "usual suspects – Chomsky, Harvey, Klein, Monbiot, Varoufakis	The blog has noted several times the reluctance of writers to develop common ground in their various analyses – let alone develop a proper annotated bibliography about the crisis…..
“Global justice”	The search for a more sustainable and acceptable alternative economic model	Smart CSOs Great Transition Initiative CASSE	The ecological crisis has more resonance for change than talk about capitalism – so the most effective bodies which have captured global attention tend to focus initially on that – but increasingly broaden out to talk of alternative economic models

It’s interesting, of course, that newspaper headlines rarely refer to these fundamental issues – with the single exception of extreme weather conditions….

Perhaps this post is beginning to show the influence of the material I’ve been reading in the past week or so about thinking in terms of systems…..?? It’s suggesting that those of us angry with the way the world is being run need to –

-       Show more sensitivity to how issues are being defined in campaigns we’re not involved in

-       Spend more time making common cause with others

-       Clarifying our “theory of change”

-       Challenging the leaders of campaigns about such things…

Recommended Further Reading

Systemic activism in a polarised world (Smart CSOs 2018)

Theories of Change and the vision of the Great Transformation (Smart CSOs 2016)

How to break out of the system trap (Smart CSOs 2013)

Effective Change Strategies for the Great Transformation – 5 leverage points for civil society organs (Smart CSOs 2011)

The US as a "rogue nation"

Trump the man does not interest me – I blogged about him only just before his victory and on his inauguration speech…agreeing with those who felt that the best way to deal with a narcissist was to ignore it.

I do, however, understand those who have argued that his "shock" ideology represents an existential threat to the post-war order - trouble is that most of those articulating that position are smug members of an Establishment which, in every country, sustains an economic system that is simply unsustainable….

I do still have some friends (actually one) who argue that his petulant smashing of the other babies’ bricks will produce a better system….While some interpretations of systems theory might offer some support to that, the damage Trump’s America is doing to institutional trust is unmeasurable….

The mogul is this weekend sleeping on the Firth of Clyde which I still, after some 30 years' absence, call home. He seems proud that his mother was a Scot – forced, at age 18, to cross the Atlantic for a better life. Ironic that his mother and wives were all immigrants….

The Guardian has just published an editorial which superbly reflects feelings in the country after a week which has seen the resignation of the 2 key Cabinet Ministers responsible for Brexit. Basically it says that –

-       The British PM was warned very strongly by probably the majority of British opinion that her invitation in Jan 2017 to Trump to make an official visit to the UK would be a disaster

-       The actual outcome has been even worse for her and her Government than she might have feared in her worst nightmares

-       Trump’s behaviour in the past week in Europe now shows that only can the UK no longer expect any reasonable deal from the US but that, even more seriously,

-       The USA has now declared itself a “rogue nation”

-       US official policy is now to destroy the EU and destabilise NATO (of which, please note, I am no great supporter)

-       US policy is now one of encouragement of nationalist forces wanting regime change in EU countries

The British government did its absolute best – given that the streets of the cities were full of protesters – to lay on a glittering welcome for Mr Trump this week. Blenheim, Sandhurst, Chequers, Windsor – you don’t get much more in the way of British establishment red carpet than that. But this reckoned without the Trump character and, more sinisterly, the Trump political project.
The president undermined Mrs May before he even left America. He bullied and lied at the Nato summit in Brussels. He then gave an explosive and deliberately destabilising interview to Rupert Murdoch’s Sun on the very day of his arrival in Britain.This guaranteed that Friday’s press conference at Chequers would be purgatorial for Mrs May and maybe even a little chastening for the president and his team. And so it proved, in spite of what had clearly been the private reading of the diplomatic equivalent of the Riot Act to Mr Trump.

But it was not just the rudeness that mattered – though rudeness does matter, a lot, both in personal and in public things. It was the political impact and consequence. That unmistakable consequence is that Mr Trump’s America can no longer be regarded with certainty as a reliable ally for European nations committed to the defence of liberal democracy. That is an epochal change for Britain and for Europe. Everything about this disastrous and embarrassing presidential visit could have been avoided with more thought and more political sense.

But Mrs May and her advisers rushed to Washington in January 2017 to offer a state visit to a president who had barely entered the White House, whose measure as an ally they had not yet properly taken, but who already had it in his character and his power to transform the event from a relatively harmless occasion into a deeply wounding one.
 It was a shameful and stupid misjudgment.
The hostile public reaction was immediate and without precedent.

Everything that has happened this week confirms that the Trump visit should not have taken place.Mrs May should have grasped from the very start that Mr Trump was not an ally when it came to her Brexit strategy. Mr Trump wants to break up international organisations like Nato and the EU.
He embraced Brexit on that basis. He saw it as the start of a swing back towards nativist, illiberal, often racist nationalist politics, of which his own election was a further example. He made no secret of his wish to promote other nativist movements on the right. Other European leaders understood this danger, notably Angela Merkel.

Mrs May failed to do so. Mrs May rightly wanted a close post-Brexit relationship with the EU, a stance that led in time to the Chequers showdown with her Brexiteer ministers a week ago. But she failed to see that Mr Trump’s US has a stronger commitment to the weakening of the EU than it does to a Britain that wants the EU to prosper.Out of that failure came the Sun interview. In the interview, Mr Trump expressed hatred for the EU, support for hard Brexit, unwillingness to strike a trade deal with the UK, contempt for Mrs May, support for Boris Johnson, hostility to immigration, and offered his barely coded belief that the UK – and Europe – is “losing your culture”.

The interview, its content, its timing, and the fact that it was given to Mr Murdoch’s flagship anti-EU tabloid, was a deliberate hostile act. For Mrs May, fighting to control her party on the dominant issue facing Britain, it was simply a stab in the back. But it wasn’t fundamentally personal.

It was a declaration of hostility to Britain and Europe and the values they stand for.A president who supported the Atlantic alliance, the stability of Europe and liberal democratic values – in short, every other US president of the postwar era – would never have done such a thing. Such a president would have tried to help, would have seen the EU-UK problem as one that needed solving, and would have used his influence to get America’s European allies to find a shared way forward after Brexit. Such a president would have been doing the right thing. But Mr Trump is not such a president. He is not our ally. He is hostile to our interests and values. He may even, if this goes on, become a material threat.

This week he deliberately inflamed the politics of Europe and of Britain. Yes, Mrs May brought it on herself, but it was hard not to feel for her as a person over the last day and half. She now needs to learn the lesson, and to lead Britain, Brexit or no Brexit, into a constructive and effective relationship with our more dependable allies, who share our values, in Europe.