When the spark ignites

Sometimes a nation or a people feel such humiliation and anger about the way they are being treated that it takes only one incident to spark off a protest which makes the prevailing regime crumble. It’s said that one picture is worth (variously) a thousand or ten thousand words - although, these days, I would put the equation at more like a billion words and I would focus on dramatic actions - rather than pictures.  

Last month I discussed a neglected classic which explored the question of how people such as Jesus Christ and Mahatmi Gandhi came to inspire the world….Emile Zola’s famous J’Accuse letter may have been more than a hundred years ago but inspired one of the western world’s first social movements – which split France in half.
Saul Alinsky’s writings set in motion several generations of community activists. A black woman refused in December 1955 to obey racist instructions to move to the back of a bus…- thereby starting what became the US Civil Rights movement…….Police brutality has often been the cause of riots eg the Watts Riots of August 1965 in Los Angeles.

But it was probably Jan Palach’s act of setting himself on fire on 16 January 1969 in the centre of Prague (in protest against people’s indifference to the Russian invasion in the summer) which made the greatest impact. His memory stayed alive for the 20 years it took for the country to liberate itself……

 93-year old Stephane Hessel was so offended by the world’s treatment of Palestine (amongst other things) that in 2010 he published Time for Outrage (2010) which quickly climbed to the top of the best sellers….
Later that same year Mohamed Bouazizi - a Tunisian street vendor – also set himself alight in response to the confiscation of his wares by a municipal official and her aides. The subsequent riots led the then-president of Tunisia, Zine El Abidine Ben Ali to step down on 14 January 2011, after 23 years in power – and became a catalyst for the wider Arab Spring.

For every such defining moment, however, there are probably a million protests which lead nowhere….. The focus of protests have been variously industrial, racial, environmental, gender, housing, invasion. What, I have to wonder, makes the difference?

In all humility I wonder whether those Romanians who have taken to the street in the past couple of years - or even those such as Dorel Sandor and Alina Mungiu-Pippidi - should perhaps not be using that experience and literature to explore more deeply that basic question…..

Romania may have had blood on the streets in December 1989 but – unlike Poland and Czechoslovakia - its intellectuals were fairly passive until then (with the honourable exception of people like Ana Blandiana and Mircea Dinescu).

Social change, after all, doesn’t come from writing, consultancy or television appearances – but from a willingness to sacrifice…… Please understand that I’m not denigrating the writers when I say that – they are necessary but not sufficient. That’s clearly one of the messages which comes from the books I’ve selected for the important reading list I’ve developed below….

How, sub-consciously, we compartmentalise the world

It’s interesting what happened as I was developing this reading list……I knew that what I wanted to do was list some of books I had found useful in what is a massive literature on the experience and tactics of social struggle….ie a grassroots movement…..But I found references slipping in which I quickly realised didn’t fit……..which dealt what we might call “reform efforts from within the system of power”…..eg the World Bank titles and the Guide to Change management….. This blog has noticed repeated instances of people writing about the same issue but doing so with totally different language, concepts and “frames of reference” and – most importantly – without realising that there were “parallel universes” in which the same conversations were being conducted….

Having noticed this, I remembered the post I had done a year ago - Is it people who change systems - or systems which change people? – in which I had recounted the “pincer movement of change” I had developed in the 1970s. This argued that significant and lasting policy change required both “push and pull” – ie a combination of grassroots pressure with insiders sympathetic to change….Twenty five years later and in a different continent I developed what I called the “opportunistic” or “windows of opportunity” theory of change which I would expound to bewildered central Asian  bureaucrats…. 

“Most of the time our systems seem impervious to change – but always (and suddenly) an opportunity arises. Those who care about the future of their society, prepare for these “windows of opportunity”. And the preparation is about analysis, mobilisation and trust.

- It is about us caring enough about our organisation and society to speak out about the need for change.

- about taking the trouble to think and read about ways to improve things 

– and helping create and run networks of such change.

- And it is about establishing a personal reputation for probity and good judgement that people will follow your lead when that window of opportunity arises”.

 Reading list on social change

The selection is a very personal one and ranges from the passionate to the technical – with a  smattering of books that are more descriptive…..Temperamentally I go (at least these days) for the more analytical (and generic) works and the development literature is therefore probably a bit overrepresented (and the feminist underrepresented). Readers should also be aware that I was a strong community activist in my early days….

The first 8 titles can be read in full – as can the last 4. Strange that none of the books is written by a political scientist (with the possible exception of Gene Sharp). Machiavelli would be turning in his grave

Key Books for “social change” activists

Title	Focus	Notes
How Change Happens Duncan Green (2016)	Community groups and officials	Great overview – if from only a development experience perspective
A Guide to Change and Change Management for Rule of Law Practitioners (2015)	Transition countries Political culture	Very rare attempt to bring the insights of change management to those trying to build “rule of law” in transition and developing countries
People, Politics and Change - building communications strategy for governance reform (World Bank 2011)	Change agents in government	One of the best – straddling the various worlds of action, academia and officialdom – with the focus on fashioning an appropriate message and constituency for change
Finding Frames – new ways to engage the UK public in global poverty (2011)	Charities	A great example of frame analysis – showing the importance of trying to identify the link between social values and politics
Indignez-vous; Stephane Hessel (2010)	Social justice	Inspiring pamphlet from the Frenchman whose whole life has been an inspiration to us all
Common Cause – the case for working with our cultural values (2010)	Activists for global concerns	One of the most important 100 pages any social activist could read….it’s simply tragic that 8 years later, it would now be seen as revolutionary
Governance Reform under Real-World Conditions – citizens, stakeholders and Voice (World Bank 2008)	Change agents in government	A decade on, it’s still offers one of the clearest frameworks for making government systems work for people
Wicked Problems and clumsy solutions – the role of leadership; Keith Grint (2008)	leaders	A must-read analysis which introduced many people to frame analysis - helps us adopt a more holistic approach
Live Working, Die Fighting – how the working class went global; Paul Mason (2007)	trade unionists	A story that needed telling in a media and political world which is now so hostile to working people organising to improve their lot
Blessed Unrest – how the largest movement in the world came into being and why no one saw it coming; Paul Hawken (2007)	Environment	This is the field which has probably seen the most action – but the least results!
Change the World; Robert Quinn (2000)	Eclectic	A tragically neglected book
From Dictatorship to Democracy – a conceptual framework for liberation; Gene Sharp (1993)	Regime change	The handbook for a lot of soi-disant revolutionaries….its provenance is a bit suspect….
Putting the Last First; Robert Chambers (1983)	Donors	A morally powerful book which challenged (to little avail) the “imperialist” assumptions of most technical assistance programmes
Rules for Radicals; Saul Alinsky (1971)	Community action	THE handbook for generations of activists… the follow-up apparently to Reveille for Radicals which he published in 1946!

Occupy theory; is the first volume of a 3 vol series written by Michel Albert to mark the Occupy movement, the others being Occupy Vision and Occupy Strategy

When I googled “reading lists on social protest” I got this interesting selection https://c4aa.org/2017/02/reading-list-activism/

Plus Ca Change,,,,plus c’est la meme chose???

European countries have experienced massive changes since the end of the war – and yet, I keep on wondering, .”to what extent do national characteristics actually change”. The interview with Dorel Sandor does not seem to have attracted much notice in the country but, for me, has crystallised the various impressions about Romania I’ve conveyed in the blog in recent years

Let me summarise his key points -

- the so-called “revolution” of 1989 was nothing of the sort – just a takeover by the old-guard masquerading in the costumes of the market economy and democracy

- which, after 30 years, has incubated a new anomie – with the “mass” and “social” media dominating people’s minds

- So-called “European integration” has destroyed Romanian agriculture and industry - and drained the country of 4 million talented young Romanians

- After 30 years, there is not a single part of the system – economic, political, religious, cultural, voluntary – which offers any real prospect of positive change

- Even Brussels seems to have written the country off

- The country is locked into a paralysis of suspicion, distrust, consumerism, apathy, anomie

- No one is calling for a new start – let alone demonstrating the potential for realistic alliances

My last 2 posts have argued that -

- in the early 90s everyone (particularly outside Romania) expected too much – although remember that Ralf Dahrendorf - unique in his experience as both a German and British politician and one of the first academics in the 50s to explore the nature of the social changes which took place in Germany in the first half of the 20^th century (Society and Democracy in Germany) - had warned in 1990 that real cultural change would take “two generations”. For middle class academics, this meant 50 years!

- Absolutely no preparations existed in 1989 for the possibility that communism might collapse and for the choices this would present for political, economic and legal systems …..Everyone had assumed that the change would be in the opposite direction. The only writings which could be drawn were those about the south American, Portugese and Spanish transition ….

- The EC stopped treating Romania as in need of “developmental assistance” in 1998/99. The PHARE programme was phased out - the focus shifted to training for EU membership and the implementation of the Acquis (using the TAIEX programme). Talk of differences in political culture was seen as politically incorrect – eastern countries simply had to learn the language and habits of the European social market and, hey-presto, things would magically change……

- 30 years on, the names of Bulgarian and Romanian institutions and processes may have changed but not the fundamental reality – with a corruption which is nothing less than systemic.

- The billions of Euros allocated to Romania since 2007 under the EC’s Structural Funds programmes have compounded the systemic and moral corruption which affects all sectors.

- The Cooperation and Verification Mechanism is, after 11 years, deeply resented – despite the increasingly clear evidence of the collusion between the Prosecution and the Secret services…..

The Italian and German examples

In 1958 Ed Banfield coined the phrase “amoral familism” to characterize southern Italy and its resistance to change. In 1993 Robert Putnam extended this critique with his Making Democracy Work – civic traditions in modern Italy – pointing out that, centuries later, cultural patterns in the south still profoundly affected modern institutions …. The Italian system since then has demonstrated little capacity for change. What appeared to be a new opening in the 1990s disappointed….the old systems simply resurfaced

Germany’s traditional power structure, on the other hand, was able to change after 1945… The Weimar Republic failed to break it – but simply gave a Nazi regime the opportunity to let loose a blood-letting from which the world has not yet recovered. Three forces were required to transform German society in 1945-50 - the trauma of defeat on all fronts; the imposition by the victors of completely new institutional, legal, social and economic systems; and the Realpolitik calculations of the Cold War

Romania, however, has been able to brush off the institutional challenge which had been posed by membership of both the EC and NATO (see). The occasional scandal can and does cause the downfall of a government - but nothing now seems able to disturb its systemic inertia.

Conclusion

It has given me no pleasure to draft this post. But I feel that too many people for too long have not spoken out….In 2 months Romania will take over the Presidency of the EU which will see the full panoply(a)y of mutual sycophancy at full throttle……making it even more difficult for dissenting voices to be heard…

Dorel Sandor was least convincing when he tried to offer a way forward 

I have a list of what to do – starting with the need for an exploration of what sort of Romania we should be aiming for in the next few decades. Such a process would be moderated by professionals using proper diagnostics, scenario thinking and milestones.
It would be managed by a group with a vision emancipated from the toxic present.  

I have a lot of sympathy for such approaches – embodied, for example, in the Future Search method. It’s how I started my own political journey in 1971 – with an annual conference in a shipbuilding town facing the decline of the trade on which it had depended for so long….But any venture would have to demonstrate that it can deal with the astonishing level of distrust of others shown by the fact that, in 2014, only 7% of the Romanian population could say that “most people can be trusted” (compared with about 20% in Italy and 40% in Germany)

For my money Social Trust is one of the fundamental elements of the soil in which democracy grows. From the start of the transition Romania was caught up in a global neo-liberalism tsunami which has been corroding that soil….

A Short Reading List on Romanian political culture

Articles

RGY posts

When will it ever change? (July 2017)

Can Outsiders ever understand what’s going on in Romania? (Jan 2017)

Impervious Power (Jan 2017)

A Divided Country – dangerous times (Feb 2017)

Are Nations really masters of their fates? (April 2017)
Is it people who change systems - or systems which change people? (July 2017)

Academic articles on political culture - and Romania

Romania Redivivus (2017)

A Guide to Change and change management for Rule of Law practitioners (2015)

Hijacked modernisation - Romanian political culture in the 20^th century; Alina Mungiu-Pippidi (2007)

Poor Policy-making and how to improve it in states with weak institutions; Sorin Ionitsa (CEU 2006)

“Fatalistic political cultures” Alina Mungiu-Pippidi 2006 (chapter in Democracy and Political Culture in East Europe in which she argued (a) that it was too easy for people (not least the political elite themselves!) to use the writings of Samuel Huntington to write off countries such as Romania; and (b) that we really did need to look more closely at what various surveys (such as The World Values Survey) showed before jumping to conclusions

books

In Europe’s Shadow – two cold wars and a thirty-year journey through Romania and beyond; Robert Kaplan (2016) - a fascinating book which has an element of the “Common Book” tradition about it with its breadth of reading

A Concise History of Romania; Keith Hitchins (2014) Very readable..

Mapping Romania - notes on an unfinished journey; Ronald Young (2014) See section 7.2 at page 31 and all the annexes for the political culture references

Romania and the European Union – how the weak vanquished the strong; Tom Gallagher (2009) great narrative

Romania – borderland of Europe; Lucian Boia (2001) Very readable and well translated

Why we need to be suspicious of the idea of “political culture”

We like to think that we are “masters of our fate” and it irks us when foreigners, for example, make us realise that our behaviour is often the result of specific cultural factors which can be questioned.

The last post has made me return to a question which has haunted me since I started to work in Europe more than 30 years ago…….”to what extent can we actually change national characteristics” – let alone state institutions ???

NB – this may look a long post (and it has certainly taken a full day to compose) but it actually divides fairly easily into three separate sections – which I felt still needed to be part of a single post

1. An ignored 1990 warning

Ralf Dahrendorf was a famous German sociologist/UK statesman who wrote in 1990 an extended public letter first published under the title “Reflections on the Revolution in Europe” and then expanded as Reflections on the Revolution of our Time. In it he made the comment that it would take one or two years to create new institutions of political democracy in the recently liberated countries of central Europe; maybe five to 10 years to reform the economy and make a market economy; and 15 to 20 years to create the rule of law. But it would take maybe two generations to create a functioning civil society there.

A former adviser to Vaslev Havel, Jiri Pehe, referred 7 years ago to that prediction and suggested that  

“what we see now is that we have completed the first two stages, the transformation of the institutions, of the framework of political democracy on the institutional level, there is a functioning market economy, which of course has certain problems, but when you take a look at the third area, the rule of the law, there is still a long way to go, and civil society is still weak and in many ways not very efficient.”

He then went on to make the useful distinction between “democracy understood as institutions and democracy understood as culture”  

“It’s been much easier to create a democratic regime, a democratic system as a set of institutions and procedures and mechanism, than to create democracy as a kind of culture – that is, an environment in which people are actually democrats”.

2. Where did talk about “political cultures” first start?

The idea of “political culture” is – as the academics have taken to put it – a “contested field”…Not that this has stopped wild assertions being made about national characteristics. Indeed it has spawned one of the most enjoyable of book genres - who, for example, can resist We, Europeans – with its amusing vignettes of our various mutual neighbours? And, although the Xenophobe series does rather take this to extremes, some of this stuff can actually be quite insightful – for example, this good expose of the phrases Brits use – with columns distinguishing what our European partners generally understand by various common phrases from what Brits really mean by them 

And, since we all first noticed globalisation in the 1980s, another new field has been spawned – that of “comparative management” whose foremost writers have been Geert Hofstede, Ronnie Lessem and Frans Trompenaars ….Richard D Lewis’s When Cultures Collide – leading across Cultures  (1996) is perhaps the most readable treatment.

There used indeed to be an area called “path dependency” which argued that our behaviour was much more influenced by historical cultural patterns than we imagined. It focused initially on technical examples such as the layout of the typewriter - but found new life after the fall of communism. Indeed it gave rise to a sub-field of political science called “transitology” (which I try to explain in chapter 2 of my 1999 book In Transit – notes on good governance) 
Political culture versus rational choice – the example of the Czech-Slovak transition is one of the better examples of the genre and The political culture of unified Germany (written by a German academic) puts the field in the wider context of “political culture”

Culture Matters – how values shape human progress; ed Lawrence Harrison and SP Huntington is not an easy book to find these days. It came out in 2000 but attracted the entirely appropriate comment that a more appropriate title would have been Western Culture Matters  

And that indeed is the problem - that commentary about other cultures is imbued with notions not only of “the other” but with those of superiority and inferiority….

This raises the obvious question of what sort of person might be best placed to do an insightful (if not objective) analysis of a political culture. The answer, I would suggest, comes from using 2 axes – one to denote the “status” one (insider/outsider); the other to denote something like “the generalist/specialist” spectrum.

Robert Kaplan would be an example of a generalist outsider in Romania’s case – Mungiu-Pippidi an example of a specialist insider, although perhaps not the best example in view of her Berlin location and international profile…The historian Lucian Boia might be a better example…..

3. How 2 American political scientists tarred the Italian Image

Edward Banfield’s study in the early 1950s of a small town in southern Italy whose inhabitants displayed loyalty only to the members of their nuclear family and who had absolutely no sense of social responsibility for wider circles. The book (published in 1955) was called “The Moral Basis of a Backward Society” 

Banfield concluded that the town's plight was rooted in the distrust, envy and suspicion displayed by its inhabitants' relations with each other. Fellow citizens would refuse to help one another, except where one's own personal material gain was at stake. Many attempted to hinder their neighbours from attaining success, believing that others' good fortune would inevitably harm their own interests. "Montegrano"'s citizens viewed their village life as little more than a battleground. Consequently, there prevailed social isolation and poverty—and an inability to work together to solve common social problems, or even to pool common resources and talents to build infrastructure or common economic concerns.

"Montegrano"'s inhabitants were not unique nor inherently more impious than other people. But for quite a few reasons: historical and cultural, they did not have what he termed "social capital"—the habits, norms, attitudes and networks that motivate folk to work for the common good.

This stress on the nuclear family over the interest of the citizenry, he called the ethos of ‘amoral familism’. This he argued was probably created by the combination of certain land-tenure conditions, a high mortality rate, and the absence of other community building institutions.

Fast forward sixty years to an article in “City Compass Guide Romania” in which an expat (and, full disclosure) friend of mine wrote….

If you are fortunate enough to drive in Bucharest you will witness what is probably the clearest evidence of mass individualism in global human society. Romanian people, of all shapes, sizes, social and educational backgrounds and income brackets will do things in their cars that display a total disregard for sanity and other drivers.

Manoeuvres such as parking in the middle of the street, u-turning on highways without any warning and weaving between lanes in heavy traffic at 150 kilometres per hour are commonplace and point to an extreme lack of concern for the safety or even the simple existence of others.

The next time you are waiting to get on a plane at Henri Coandă airport, take a little time to observe how queuing in an orderly and effective manner is clearly regarded as an af­front to the sovereignty of the Romanian individual. Enjoy the spectacle of the pushing, shoving and general intimida­tion that follows the arrival of the airport staff to supervise boarding. Even while watching an international rugby test match you will only occasionally see the same intense level of barely controlled aggression.

Outside of their core social networks Romanians closely follow the rule stating that it is every man, woman and child for themselves. ……There is an opinion poll, published in early 2012, show­ing that around 90 percent of the Romanian population regards almost all of their compatriots as utterly untrust­worthy and incompetent. At the same time 90 percent, possibly the same 90 percent, see themselves as being abso­lutely beyond reproach. This is clearly an extreme response no matter how you view it and provides evidence of an ex­traordinary and troubling imbalance within the generality of Romania’s social relationships.

There is a well-known prayer in Romania, which roughly goes: “Dear God, if my goat is so ill that it will die, please make sure that my neighbour’s goat dies too.”

So what does this commonality suggest? The EU’s first Ambassador here was Karen Fogg who gave every consultant who came here in the early 1990s (like me) a summary of what can be seen as the follow-up to Banfield’s book – Robert Putnam’s Making Democracy Work – civic traditions in Italy (1993) which suggested that the laggardly nature of southern Italian Regions was due entirely to this “amoral familism”.  Putnam made an even greater play of missing “social capital” – indeed spawned an incredible technocratic literature on the concept and ideas on how it could be “engineered” to deal with the new alienation of modern capitalism..

Romanian communism, of course, had almost 50 years to inculcate more cooperative attitudes and behaviour – but the forced nature of “collective farms”; the forced migration of villagers to urban areas to drive industrialisation; and the scale of Securitate spying created a society where, paradoxically, even fewer could trusted anyone.      

From 1990 the market became God; Reagan and Thatcher had glorified greed; the state was “bad"; and television – which had been limited by Ceausescu to 2 hours a day - the great “good”……As the commercial stations and journals spread, the values of instant gratification became dominant (one of the points Dorel Sandor makes)……

To be continued…..