Do Social Democrats Think Any More?

I didn’t actually send a nomination to Social Europe for "the thinker who most influenced the European social democratic agenda last year” – simply because it’s so obvious that thought has no real place in the construction of social democratic party agendas and activities these days. It’s all a question of focus groups, sound-bites and clandestine negotiations with media and financial interests. I was tempted therefore to suggest the name of Peter Mandelson who first concocted this diabolic formula. But an additional reason is that I didn’t want to add to the anglo bias of the Social Europe website. There must be many interesting German, French, Dutch and Scandinavian "writers” who have some useful thoughts to offer reform parties. Sadly, however, I have not been able to find my way to their blogs and papers – until now! Rene Cuperus is a Dutchman who has written well and provocatively about the causes of social democratic decline – and it was through following links to him that I came across two websites which are actually devoted to the revitalisation of social democratic thinking at a European indeed global level. The first is Policy Network which, at first glance, seems too focussed on political leaders for my taste. But their publications are worthwhile – particularly a recent one Priorities for a new political economy - Memos to the left which has introductory essays by Will Hutton and Colin Crouch amongst others and then 19 short essays by European (British, Danish, Dutch, Norwegian and Spanish) and North and Latin American writers. Interesting that Germans don’t really figure in such books – they are not anguishing the way the rest of us do. They just get on with sustaining a system which is, broadly, working?
Another title which looks interesting is Social Progress in the 21st Century – social invetsment, labour market reform and inter-generational inequality which was also funded by the second useful website I came across - the European progressive political foundation (FEPS). Set up in 2008 and close to the Party of European Socialists (PES), FEPS explores new ways of thinking on the social democratic, socialist and labour scene in Europe. Its publications look interesting and I hope to report on one in particular which I have downloaded – a tribute to Tony Judt and the challenge he posed us in his penultimate book "Ill Fares the Land".

I have just found (and added to the links on the right-side) a great blog devoted to superb, off-beat examples of Romanian architecture. It’s bilingual and called A patriot’s Guide to Romania.

Power - and saws

First thing morning, my druzhbar (power saw) was serviced by a young neighbour, Rasvan - and immediately powered through the thick tree branches at the front. Then the heavy work of carting them up to the house! By then it was midday - and the wind was really up; with the sun making it very acceptable - particularly on the terrace at the back with a wine after preparing another bean soup with the great new pressure cooker.

Hopefully tomorrow I can finish the sawing and storing of the wood. Three branches have given enough for a couple of weeks sustained heating!

The internet is impossibly slow now and will probably make further blogging impossible until I get back to Sofia - at the end of the week. I do realise that the title I gave to today's post - Come back Corporatism -does beg a lot of questions! Talk of the "new political class" points to the great "cosiness" (collusion) between political, corporate and media elites. But the corporatism of northern european system is a negotiated system composed of powerful groups which balance one another!

Come back Corporatism - all is forgiven!

The events of the past few years have made millions of people angry with their political leaders and disillusioned with the political and economic systems in which they operate.

But for anything to happen, there have to be feasible and legitimate options capable of gaining the support of a significant number of people.

That’s quite a challenging set of preconditions – feasibility, legitimacy and support! A paper on my website tries to track the various analyses and reforms which have been offered in the past decade or so (excluding technical tinkering).

But nothing will happen without catalysts for that change – individuals who have an understanding of the social process of the transformation process and the skills and credibility to ease change into place. Noone buys blueprints (let alone manifestos) any more. And politicians in many countries have lost credibility. Process is all. So where are the catalysts who have that understanding and skill sets; and who cannot be fitted into the conventional political labels?

It was by accident that I pulled a book from my library yesterday which has been lying unread since I bought it years ago. It was Paul Hirst’s From Statism to Pluralism produced in 1997 from various papers he had written in the previous 5 years and arguing the case for “associational democracy” in both the public and private sectors. It has a powerful beginning –

The brutalities of actually existing socialism have fatally crippled the power of socialist ideas of any kind to motivate and inspire. The collapse of communism and the decline of wars between the major industrial states have removed the major justifications of social democracy for established elites – that it could prevent the worse evil of communism and that it could harness organized labour in the national war effort.

Those elites have not just turned against social democracy, but they almost seem to have convinced significant sections of the population that a regulated economy and comprehensive social welfare are either unattainable or undesirable

.He then goes on to argue that –
• more “associational” forms of democracy and wider decision-making would help re-balance the centralisation of the state and the dominance of big business. In this view ‘association’ means groups of people who have similar concerns, views, and aims.
• Associationalism (it has many similarities with mutualism) is the most neglected of the great 19th century doctrines of social organisation. It lost out to collectivism and individualism. But conditions have now changed dramatically and make it an appropriate principle of reform and renewal of Western societies.
• widely distributed methods of decision-making, (both within and between organisations and groups throughout society and the economy) would better enable effective, informed and appropriate action. It might reduce the need for complex top-down regulation, better distribute wealth and security, and offer a potential solution to mistrust and social disintegration within communities.

Sadly Hirst died in 2003 but I discovered yesterday that other people in Britain have recently been going back to his papers and books. Indeed a booklet was produced earlier this year on the discussions.

Clearly the renewed interest stems from the UK Prime Minister’s interest in what he calls the “Big Society” – of public services being managed by its workers (part of the mutualist approach) or by community and voluntary organizations (social enterprise). Although Cameron was talking about this before the global crisis, the concept is a bit suspect these days with such large cuts in public expenditure.

However, social enterprise has a long and honourable tradition and was one I was proud to work for in the 1980s. A recent article set out how the Hirst agenda and social enterprise fit However the elephant in the room is the Big Corporation – and here the limits of (if not the motives for) the Cameron agenda are perhaps most exposed.

And Hirst too does not say much about the economic side of things which Will Hutton was so eloquent about at the same time (stakeholder society) – beyond a few comments about the “industrial districts of Italy”.

Although Germany gets a brief passing remark or two, I find it astounding that the “corporatist” model of North Europe does not get proper treatment. Is that because “corporatism” got a bad name in Britain in the 1970s (it was blamed for the poor economic performance) – or because the Brits (and Americans) are so myopic about foreign activities?

 We should not underestimate the power of words and phrases – but I suspect the explanation is more the latter. I find it ironic that the Brits were very interested in the 1960s with what they could learn from France and other European countries about industrial policy - but that they have no such interest when part of the European Union!

Apart from the usual academic books about German politics, I know of only two general books on Germany in the English language – the idiosyncratic Germania by Simon Winder and Peter Watson’s doorstopper of a book German Genius – neither of which says anything about how Germany managed, in the post-war period period, to become such a politically and economically resilient country.

The only serious article I know about the country are the 60 pages in Perry Anderson’s The New Old World. I remember in the 1970s we had a huge book by John Ardagh which took us through all aspects of contemporary Germany. Now the books are shallow (and mocking) travelogues whcih say more about the Brits than the Germans.

However there is a recent academic paper which explores why a “coordinated market economy” was first chosen as the appropriate model for Germany; and why it might still be the most appropriate for Germany but for other EC countries.

Our catastrophic elites

In 1987 a book and a film appeared in America which seemed to signal a questioning of the greed culture which had received the imprint of approval from Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. The book was Tom Wolfe’s Bonfire of the Vanities which ended with the come-uppance of one of Wall Street’s “Masters of the universe”. The film was Wall Street; Money never sleeps - starring Michael Dougals as Gordon Gekko whose signature line was "Greed, for lack of a better word, is good".
Alas, the reflective mood was momentary – indeed the broader effect seemed to have been to persuade other professions to get into the act. A decade later, a distinguished historian, Harold Perkin, published The Third Revolution - Professional Elites in the Modern World(1996). In previous books Perkin had studied the rise of professional society. In this one he looked at Twentieth Century elites in the USA, England, France, Germany, Russia and Japan - and finds their behaviour equally deficient and morally irresponsible -

What all six countries, except Germany, are found to have in common are greed and corruption, from the wholesale fraud, embezzlement, and bribery practised by Soviet apparatchiks , through the systematic bribery of Japanese politicians by the big corporations, and the apparently general corruption in French local government contracts, to the more 'legitimate' but dubiously ethical machinations of junk bond merchants in the U. S. or take-over conmen in Britain. This is attributed to the professional elites who are 'good servants but bad masters', and when they have power are liable to abuse it, exploit the masses, and line their own pockets. At this point one cannot help concluding that there is nothing new under the sun, that ruling elites or cliques have always been tempted to enrich themselves, and that corruption, even blatant and very large- scale corruption, is not an invention of professional society.

It is a book which should be given to each individual when (s)he makes it into their country's "Who's Who" and becomes part of the "system".
A few years earlier, a powerful but different critique of our elites had been launched by Christopher Lasch - The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy. The book's title is a take-off on Jose Ortega y Gasset's The Revolt of the Masses, a reactionary work published in 1930 that ascribed the crisis of Western culture to the "political domination of the masses." Ortega believed that the rise of the masses threatened democracy by undermining the ideals of civic virtue that characterized the old ruling elites. But in late twentieth-century America it is not the masses so much as an emerging elite of professional and managerial types who constitute the greatest threat to democracy, according to Lasch -

The new cognitive elite is made up of what Robert Reich called "symbolic analysts" — lawyers, academics, journalists, systems analysts, brokers, bankers, etc. These professionals traffic in information and manipulate words and numbers for a living. They live in an abstract world in which information and expertise are the most valuable commodities. Since the market for these assets is international, the privileged class is more concerned with the global system than with regional, national, or local communities. In fact, members of the new elite tend to be estranged from their communities and their fellow citizens. "They send their children to private schools, insure themselves against medical emergencies ... and hire private security guards to protect themselves against the mounting violence against them," Lasch writes. "In effect, they have removed themselves from the common life."
The privileged classes, which, according to Lasch's "expansive" definition, now make up roughly a fifth of the population, are heavily invested in the notion of social mobility. The new meritocracy has made professional advancement and the freedom to make money "the overriding goal of social policy." "The reign of specialized expertise," he writes, "is the antithesis of democracy as it was understood by those who saw this country as the 'last, best hope of earth'". Citizenship is grounded not in equal access to economic competition but in shared participation in a common life and a common political dialogue. The aim is not to hold out the promise of escape from the "labouring classes," Lasch contends, but to ground the values and institutions of democracy in the inventiveness, industry, self-reliance, and self-respect of working people.
The decline of democratic discourse has come about largely at the hands of the elites, or "talking classes," as Lasch refers to them. Intelligent debate about common concerns has been almost entirely supplanted by ideological quarrels, sour dogma, and name-calling. The growing insularity of what passes for public discourse today has been exacerbated, he says, by the loss of "third places" — beyond the home and workplace — which foster the sort of free-wheeling and spontaneous conversation among citizens on which democracy thrives. Without the civic institutions — ranging from political parties to public parks and informal meeting places — that "promote general conversation across class lines," social classes increasingly "speak to themselves in a dialect of their own, inaccessible to outsiders."

Lasch proposes something else: a recovery of what he calls the “populist tradition,” and a fresh understanding of democracy, not as a set of procedural or institutional arrangements but as an ethos, one that the new elites have been doing their best to undermine.

It has to be said that neither book made much impact – perhaps they were just seen as “moralizing”. Contrast that with the impact made in 1958 by JK Galbraith’s The Affluent Society. Has any recent book, I wonder, made the same impact? Perhaps the Spirit Level – why equality is better for everyone by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett (2009) comes closest. I would therefore have to nominate them for the Social Europe award mentioned recently - although I personally think that Danny Dorling's 2010 Injustice - why social inequality persists is a more powerful book since it doesn't just itemise the inequalities but identifies and explodes the various rationalisations which sustain them.

Triumph of the political class

Thunder has been reverbating around the valleys in the last couple of days, knocking out my electricity several times. But that is not the reason for my silence. I have been absorbed by one of the books in the latest Amazon package (which arrived within 2 days of my ordering them) – Peter Oborne’s The Triumph of the Political Class. Some months ago I said that noone seemed to be celebrating the anniversary of Robert Michels’ Political Parties which appeared a hundred years ago and which was one of the seminal books of my university years – suggesting that trade unions and social democratic parties were inevitably destined to betrayal by their leaders through the “iron law of oligarchy”. Havong tasted the perks of power, they don't easily let it go. Oborne’s book appeared in 2007 - but is a worthy successor and offers important perspectives to the various posts I’ve made about the collapse of our democracy -

Lewis Namier (1888-1960) argued in his masterwork "The Structure of Politics at the Accession of George III" that talk of great battles of principle between the Whigs and Tories of Hanoverian England was nonsense. Ministers were in politics for the money and to advance the interests of their cliques. MPs who boasted of their independence were forever seeking favours from the public purse. Ideology mattered so little that 'the political life of the period could be fully described without ever using a party denomination'.

You can do the same today, argues Peter Oborne in this thought-provoking polemic. Members of the 21st-century 'political class' are as isolated and self-interested as their Georgian predecessors. The political class is very different from the old establishment. It despises the values of traditional institutions that once acted as restraints on the power of the state - the independence of the judiciary, the neutrality of the Civil Service and the accountability of ministers to the Commons.

If you are young and ambitious and want to join, Oborne sketches out a career path. First, you must set yourself apart from your contemporaries at university by taking an interest in politics. You must join a think-tank or become researcher to an upwardly mobile MP on graduation. Before getting to the top, you will have eaten with, drunk with and slept with people exactly like you, not only in politics but in the media, PR and advertising - trades the old establishment despised, but you admire for their ability to manipulate the masses.
You will talk a language the vast majority of your fellow citizens can't understand and be obsessed with the marketing of politics rather than its content. You will notice that once in power, you can get away with behaviour that would have stunned your predecessors. You can use your position to profit from lecture tours and negotiate discounts, as the wife of PM Tony Blair uniquely did. Politics will be your career. You will have no experience of other trades and be a worse politician for it. Despite the strong language you may use against other political parties, you will develop a stronger loyalty to parliamentarians (regardless of political label) than others and will close ranks if their privileges are under threat.

I have only two quibbles with the book - first that he attributes the decline of parliament to the new political class - but its decline goes back several decades before that. He makes an interesting point, however, about the Whip's power being challenged in the past decade by the power of the Press Secretary (whipping the media into its place). And, although he mentions Mosca's famous book on the political class of a hundred years ago, he fails to place his critique in the wider critical literature. See tomorrow's post for more on this.

Ways we see the world

I don’t know whether the generations which have grown up with television and the internet experience have experienced the power of seminal texts which many in my generation did. I was driven this past week to think about the key authors who had a profound influence (during my spell at University) on my way of looking at the world. For probably the first time, I saw the common theme in their message – celebration of pluralism and of scepticism at a time when the influence of ideology was still strong. I should also have mentioned the writing of Bernard Crick whose book “In Defence of Politics” (1962) celebrated the practice of politics as a necessary and honourable one and may have been one of the factors leading me a few years later to go into local politics. (We are in need of such a text these days!)
Two difficult recent questions have made me think about “figures of influence” – a question about which contemporary figure (s) I admired (I could come up only with that of Riccardo Petrella); and, today, with an invitation from Social Europe to nominate the (living) “thinkers” (my inverted commas) with the biggest influence on the European left-of-centre agenda in 2010/2011.
When I read the names of those nominated last year, my immediate reaction was that the left thoroughly deserved its present pathetic electoral position if the poll was correct in its judgement. The first three names were Paul Krugman, Juergen Habermas and Slavoj Zizek (who??). Even worse was that Anthony Giddens, Daniel Cohn-Bendit and Umberto Eco came next. Then Zygmund Bauman, Poul Nyrup Rasmussen, Oskar Lafontaine, Ulrich Beck, Manuel Castells and (wait for it!)…Ed Miliband! When, 10 years ago, I wrote my own list of inspiring “standard bearers” it did include Lafontaine (and George Monbiot).
But I’m not sure how sensible the poll is – each country is so different – and how does one actually measure the influence which any thinker has had? And what exactly is a “thinker”? Do we not all think? And if by “thinker” we mean an academic such as Etzioni, is there not a certain contradition between being a “thinker” and having an influence on party agendas? Of course, you will say, neo-liberals such as Hayek have had a profound influence on the agendas of all parties in the past couple of decades – but he is dead. Keynes put it so well in 1935

The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed the world is ruled by little else. Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back. I am sure that the power of vested interests is vastly exaggerated compared with the gradual encroachment of ideas

.There are so many voices today that we often require an intermediary (journalists like Will Hutton, Paul Mason and George Monbiot) to act as mediators and popularisers.
In any event, I would prefer to explore which “writers” have the most to offer the social democrats – regardless of the likelihood of their message being bought. In the article I wrote a couple of weeks back for the Romanian journal, I found myself using two quotations from the world of a green Irish economist - Richard Douthwaite – and would therefore certainly nominate him. I will now look around my (extensive) bookshelves and see who else should be nominated. And you, gentle reader? Who would you nominate?
I'm glad to be able to show a Romanian painting for once - by late 19th century painter Theodor Pallady

Sceptic pluralist

The superb weather continues – azure blue sky, blazing sun, light breeze and scattered fluffy clouds. A run down to Bran to stock up and bumped twice people into I knew! I’m obviously becoming a native at last. It will be difficult to tear myself away – but Bulgaria does now beckon with the resumption of workshops there next week
I’m still reflecting on the editorial labelling my published article in Revista 22 got last week (“view from the left”) and, specifically, the “key influences” I referenced in my initial blog response (Crosland and Shonfield). I realised that I had missed some of those whose writings I came across when I was at University and which, effectively, marked me for life – namely Karl Popper, Joseph Schumpeter, Reinhold Niebuhr, JK Galbraith, Robert Michels and Ralf Dahrendorf (in that order). All shared a sceptical and pluralistic outlook on life – and these 2 words are more important to me than “left” which, sadly, embraces all that’s best and worst in politics. I am not trying to establish liberal credentials – particularly since one of the 2 (funded) supplements in that issue of Revista 22 was an eight-page summary of 23 “right-intellectual” streams of thought. Just wondering where I actually stand in relation to all that has been written about social improvement in the past century.
I suppose I was always a bit “elusive” politically. I wrote once that I never felt I really “belonged” anywhere (my upbringing on the class-divide in a Scottish shipbuilding town saw to that). The more I read, the more confused was life and the path to take – both individually and collectively.
For those who want to taste the real Popper, the 800 pages of The Open Society and its Enemies are available here.
And a short and dismissive libertarian review (“sheer social democracy”) can be read here.
But my reflections brought up this gem – of Ralf Dahrendorf in conversation in 1989 in a great history series

Why is it that the older I get, the better the writing seems to become? I finished a few days ago another “travelogue” (there has to be a better name for such sublime writing) - Out of Steppe about the lost peoples of central asia where I spent 5 years of my life. And I have now started another in this genre of well-read young Englishmen immersing themselves in the life of people whose predecessors suffered repression, forced marches and exile – Rebel Land – among Turkey’s Forgotten People. Reading about the suffering of these diverse groups from the Balkans, Caucasus and Turkey certainly makes the grievances of the Scots rather trivial!

Another reminder of what Roosevelt’s programme for artists during the Great Depression produced. Where is its like today?

Do we need the state?

On Friday, the clouds were mottled and swirling in a string wind – autumn, it seemed, had closed down summer. But the last 2 days have been cloudless and the dawn now announces a similar day. Yesterday, as I was preparing the potato omelette with the eggs my neighbours had brought me (and a very tasty soup); the milk from their cow (who feeds on our grass); the locally prepared cheese I had bought from other neighbours; and the salami from a neighbouring village, I realised that, here in my village, I am almost self-sufficient (if we count the village as “self” and allow me to keep my oriental spices and large, white Bulgarian beans (“Bob” – as they are called). My overheads (I have to keep on pinching myself) are 100 euros a month (including power, heating, tax and insurance). It is petrol and the mobile phone (25 euros) which adds to the expenses (and the wine and palinka/Rakia stocks!)
By coincidence, I came across this American paper which confronts the possibility of the collapse of American society – and how people should cope. Sadly (but typically) a lot of space is concerned with guns and self-defence. And the paper makes no reference to the blog which has, for some years, been dealing (on a weekly basis) with the “peak oil syndrome”; how it would affect the (unrealistic) way of life of north americans; and what practical steps people could be taking now to develop the resilience which will be necessary to cope with the new conditions. One of my readers has drawn my attention to a book published in 2008 which suggested many of the conditions which led to the collapse of the Soviet Union (military spending; oil shortage, debt, trade deficit) are now present in the USA - Orlov’s Reinventing Collapse - but that much of the infrastructure available to the Russians to cope (eg District heating; vegetable plots) is missing in North America.
North Americans, of course, do not factor the state into these issues since they assume that the state is part of the problem. In Europe – despite the neo-liberal hollowing out of the state and politicians increasingly being seen as hollow puppits – many persist in our belief that collective action still has a role. The question is whether politicians and the state can rise to the challenge.

Last November I suggested that any convincing argument for systemic reform needed to tackle four questions -
• Why do we need major change in our systems?
• Who or what is the culprit?
• What programme might start a significant change process?
• What mechanisms (process or institutions) do we need to implement such programmes?

Earlier this year I drafted a paper which tried, amongst other things, to summarise some of the writing on the second and third of these questions - but have not given proper attention to the last question.
One of the bloggers I respect has, however, recently turned his attention to the issue of the moral basis for a greater role for the state.
And a recent paper from the Quality of Governance Institute by Bo Rothstein, entitled Creating a sustainable solidaristic society - a manual is also relevant.

The proper and legitimate role of the state are, of course, central concerns of this blog of mine. It was only when I started my work with governments in transition countries 20 years ago that I started to think seriously about the subject – although my debureaucratising mission of the 1970s in Scottish local government had made me think very hard about the role of local government and its various stakeholders. But this was hardly the most appropriate preparation for the issue of what “the state” might reasonably be expected to do in the special conditions of post-communism? And, in any event, the basic questions of the role of the state were quickly settled in Central Europe in 1990-92 without any public discussion – thanks to international bodies such as The World Bank. You would nonetheless have thought that some academics in countries such as Slovakia (which has twice experienced the process of state-building - once in 1918 as part of Czechoslovakia, then in 1993) might have pulled together some lessons and considerations about the role of the state!

I’ve also started to Fukuyama’s latest tomb – The Origins of Political Order - which appeared in the spring. It’s a sequel of sorts to the late Samuel Huntington’s classic “Political Order in Changing Societies.” Fukuyama’s update of Huntington’s work examines what current scholarship understands about the evolution of states. Beginning with hunter-gatherers, the book ranges across an astonishing array of knowledge to look at the development of countries, up to the French Revolution. (A second volume is intended to pick up where “The Origins of Political Order” leaves off). Evolutionary biology, sociology, political philosophy, anthropology – all these disciplines are mined for insights into what is among the most difficult problems in international politics: the question of how to establish modern, functioning states. David Runciman summarises thus

Human beings have always organised themselves in tight-knit groups – there never was a Rousseauian paradise of free-spirited individuals roaming contentedly through the primordial forests. The trouble was that the first human societies were too tight-knit. These were essentially kinship groups and generated what Fukuyama calls "the tyranny of cousins". People would do almost anything for their relatives, and almost anything to the people who weren't (rape, pillage, murder). This was a recipe for constant, low-level conflict, interspersed with periodic bouts of serious blood-letting.
The way out of the kinship trap was the creation of states (by which Fukuyama means centralised political authorities), which were needed to break the hold of families. States are one of the three pillars Fukuyama identifies as providing the basis for political order. The reason that powerful states aren't enough on their own is that political power doesn't necessarily solve the problem of kinship. Instead, it can simply relocate it up the chain, so that all you get are strong rulers who use their power to favour their relatives, a phenomenon that is all too easy to identify, from the ancient world to contemporary Libya. So the rule of states needs to be supplemented by the rule of law, which imposes limits on political power and corruption. However, the rule of law itself can destabilise political order by undermining the ability of states to take decisive action when it is needed, and giving non-state organisations too much of a free hand. Hence the need for the third pillar: accountable government (or what we might now call democracy). This retains a strong state but allows people to change their rulers when they start behaving badly.
Fukuyama thinks that we too often treat the three pillars of political order as though they were separate goods in their own right, capable of doing the job on their own. We champion democracy, forgetting that without the rule of law it is liable simply to entrench social divisions. Or we champion the rule of law, forgetting that without a strong state it is liable to lead to political instability. But he also thinks that whole societies can make the same mistake. He distinguishes between a good political order, and an order that is simply "good enough", which occurs when only one or two of the building blocks is in place, giving the illusion of security. For instance, ancient China arrived at a strong centralised state far earlier than the west, in order to combat the problem of endemic civil war. But the Chinese state that emerged was too strong: it crushed the warlords but also crushed any incipient civil society or ideas of accountability. Thus China enjoyed an early advantage on the path to political order, but it was this advantage that set it back, because too much power was concentrated too soon. It is this fact, Fukuyama believes, that explains the autocratic condition of Chinese politics to this day.

Other useful reviews are here, here and here
The sculpture is in the park next to the Sofia City Gallery - marking the allied bombing of the city in 1944. For some reason some people want to remove it.....

Writing

I’ve ben racing through books in the last few days – first a marvellous tale The Last Testament of Gideon Mack by one of Scotland’s up-and-coming generation of writers, James Robertson. The link gives a review by Irvine Walsh, one of the more established of our writers, who not only gives an excellent summary and commentary on the novel but also graciously asserts that Robertson is one of Britain’s best current novellists. Certainly I enjoyed his most recent book – And the Land Lay Still which Walsh also reviews very positively (google for that). Recent political events in Scotland are an important presence in both books (indeed the main character in his most recent) – but Gideon Mack had a particular resonance for me since its main character is a “son of the manse” (who, despite lack of belief, becomes a minister himself). The sense he conveys of life in the manse (the house in which the Minister lives) as Gideon is growing up and of church activities, for me, as another “son of the manse” is very well done.
At one point he has the devil say to Mack –

I like Scotland. I like the miserable weather. I like the miserable people, the fatalism, the negativity, the violence that’s always below the surface. And I oike the way you deal with religion. One century you’re up to your lugs in it, the next you’re trading the whole apparatus for Sunday superstores. Praise the Lord and thrash the bairns. Ask and ye shall have the door shut in your face. Blessed are they that shop on the Sabbath for they shall have the best bargains. Oh yesy, this is a very fine country

Norman Lewis was also admired for his writing in the second half of the last century - although he’s better known now as a travel writer. I read earlier in the year an excellent biography of Lewis and read this week the first two parts of his autobiography – I Came, I Saw; and The World, The World. Quite sublime writing! He can summons up characters and landscapes so powerfully - and is particularly strong on the loss of traditional ways of living (whether in Spain, India, Latin America or rural Essex)

In April 2010, I blogged about the sudden commitment which appeared in Conservative manifesto to permit “free schools” – based on the Swedish model There is a story today about the apparent decline of school performance in Sweden – and some backtracking in Sweden on the concept of the “free school”

Sweden's path-breaking educational reforms of the 1990s have come under question since last December when the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development published the 2009 Programme for International Student Assessment. This showed that Swedish students had dropped to 19th place out of 57 countries for literacy, to 24th in maths, and to 28th in science. This compared with 9th, 17th and 16th in studies done in 2000, 2003 and 2006 respectively. And Swedes, used to coming near the top of just about every human development index, were appalled. Jan Björklund, the minister of education, moved to tighten central control over schools and is soon to launch a parliamentary inquiry into competition and free schools.

Just two excerpts from the discussion thread which followed - 1.

Only 10% of Swedish students go to free schools (as of 2008) so for Sweden to have been dropping in the 2009 PISA tables must surely be a reflection on the whole system, for example even if the 10% did a fantastic job it could not make up for the other 90% if they underperformed.
2. Many Swedish free schools are not run for a profit, they are run by churches or charities, so you cannot generalise about the profit motive and all Swedish free schools.

and, from one of the customers,

One of those free schools I went to, JENSEN, had half-days for all its pupils, which basically ment that you started at 8 am and left at 12ish am for 1 week, and then switched to beginning at 11 am and leaving at 4ish PM the next week. The school did this because this, basically, ment that they could have twice the amount of students in 1 school as opposed to having a full day at school which would mean less pupils = less taxpayer-money = less profit.
So they have an incentive to fill classes up with 30-40 students in tight rooms, to cut the amount of hours of teacher-led classes and to basically warehouse pupils until they are old enough to disappear.

Contingency

Faithful readers of the blog will know that I am no friend of the model of management which underpins the European Commission system of procuring Technical Assistance; and that, indeed, I have suggested it has many similarities with the Stalinist model which preceded it in the countries in which I work. Target setting; requirements to stick to activities decided hierarchically a couple of years earlier; tight monitoring - all betraying the confidence that their planned interventions can and should conquer the complexity of the world. And that failure to do so is the fault of those (lowly) individuals trying to implement the ordered change rather than the systems in which the intervention is located (or of the leaders who maintain those systems)
Aid on the Edge- Exploring complexity & evolutionary sciences in foreign aid - is a thoughtful blog which often explores these issues and had a good post this week on the debate which is apparently going on in the development field about a "results'based" approach

On one side of the results tug of war are those calling for more and better results, more rigour in analysis and more discipline in reporting. The failure of development, they argue, is basically about the failure to focus on results. ‘Modern management techniques’, especially those that are embodied by ‘results-based management’ are seen as the answer.
On the other side are those who argue for a ‘push back’ against this approach. Such reductionist approaches are seen as only suitable for certain kinds of development interventions, and that at their worst, these approaches inhibit the creativity and innovation needed to achieve results in the first place. The danger here is that we throw out the results baby with the reductionist bathwater (see here for a previous Aid on the Edge post on this).
Appropriate strategic approaches (and by extension, results approaches) need to be based on:
(a) the nature of the intervention we are looking at, and
(b) the context in which it is being delivered.
Reading across these approaches we can suggest a preliminary framework which may prove useful in bringing together different results approaches in a productive and mutually beneficial way.
First, imagine an agencies projects and programmes being distributed across a spectrum of the ‘nature of interventions’, placing relatively simple interventions on one end, and more complex issues, at the other.
Then let’s add in a vertical axes on context. Again, think of a spectrum, this time from stable/identical to dynamic/diverse. This gives us a 2 by 2 framework for analysing and mapping different development interventions. Where exactly an intervention is positioned on this framework has implications for the kinds of results orientation we can take. In the top left corner of simple interventions in identical stable settings, is the Plan and Control zone – here ‘traditional’ results-based management approach, conventional value for money analyses and randomised control trials work well.
The bottom right corner of complex interventions in diverse, dynamic settings is what I have termed Managing Turbulence. Here we need to learn from the work of professional crisis managers, the military and others working in dynamic and fluid contexts.
In between is what I have called Adaptive Management, where either because of the nature of the intervention or the nature of the context, multiple parallel experiments need to be undertaken, with real-time learning to check their relative effectiveness, scaling up those that work and scaling down those that don’t.

Sadly, my blog does not allow me to reproduce the matrix - but it is the sort of "balanced", "appropriate" or "contingent" approach I admire. I know it's fashionable to attack a "one size fits all" approach - but I find that political and managerial leaders generally find it difficult to resist the latest managerial fashion. If only more of them could develop and use such matrices!!
"Balance" is a word I have noticed this year pops up quite a lot in my writing. It was one of the central points of my Revista 22 article which appeared this week; and the importance of getting the appropriate balance between demand and supply factors is a central part of my approach to the development of effective training systems. As I thought about this, the word "requisite" also came into my mind - and I remembered the work of the sadly neglected organisational theorist Elliot Jaques

Looking at the evidence

“Evidence-based policy-making” was a phrase which, for me, epitomised UK New Labour’s ahistorical arrogance after their 1997 victory and the make-believe world they inhabited. It carried with it the dual assumption that, until their arrival in power, policy-making had not been based on evidence and that truth would now replace political prejudice. Granted, major issues such as the municipal poll tax and rail privatisation had been introduced in the previoius decade by Conservative Governments on the basis of ideology and scant regard for evidence – but it was asking us a lot to believe that political calculation and inclinations were suddenly going to vanish and politicians start behaving like technical experts. And Bliar’s constant mantra about “what works” was probably more a way for him to justify his constant rejection of old labour policies in favour of those which better fitted corporate interests. William Solesbury was part of an academic unit 10 years ago which looked critically at the fashion. However, it is still nice to see evidence incisively brought to bear on a policy issue - and this short article on the latest policy measure the Greek government is having to impose to keep financiers happy certainly does that! Has any financier even bothered to give a coherent explanation of the logic behind these actions? The Social Europe website, from which the article is taken, also has an excellent post on global measures which should be adopted.

I’ve just finished one of the most powerful descriptions of man’s inhumanity to man I've read since Robert Fisk’s The Great War for Civilisation – the conquest of the middle east.The author is Oliver Bullough; the book, Let our Fame be Great – journeys amongst the defiant people of the Caucasus and it opened my eyes to the fate which overcame the various tribes of the north east part of the Black Sea during the Tsarist period – let alone the Stalin and Putin ones. We all know about the Chechens and Ossetians – but who has heard of the Circassians, let alone of the Avars and Balkars and the repression, forced exoduses and genocide they suffered? Neal Ascherson’s great The Black Sea had introduced me to the history of the northern part of the Black Sea but not the Caucasian part. Bullough tells here how he came to write the book.

political labelling

I am deeply grateful to Revista 22 for the privilege of being one of their invited contributors to the special issue on 09/11 – particularly when I was clearly going to be out of line with their avowed “market” philosophy. And I do admire the journal for its important role in Romanian society.

I was, however, disappointed to find that they had, without consultation, added a “health warning” to the title of my article – viz “a view from the left”. Four separate issues arise from this -
- First, do the editors not realise that use of such a label for one (only) of the articles is effectively an invitation to their readers to ignore it or treat it with suspicion? What does this say about freedom of expression?
- Second, criticism of the logic and effects of “neo-liberalism” has come from a great variety of quarters – not least the ordo-liberalism which has been the backbone of the post-war German economy.
- Third, it has been recognised for a long time that the left-right labelling makes little sense. Wikipedia has an excellent briefing on this. And I recommend people do their own test on the political compass website - which uses two (not one) dimensions to try to situate people politically.

Finally, there is the issue of whether I deserve the label which has been thrown at me – either from the article or from the range of beliefs I actually hold. The references in my article are impeccably mainstream academia (Colin Crouch; Henry Mintzberg) and a final section clearly signals that I have no truck with statism.

All my political life I have supported community enterprise and been opposed to state ambitions and the “evil” it brings in, for example, the adulterated Romanian form. My business card describes me as an “explorer” – which refers not so much to the nomadic nature of my life in the last 20 years as the open nature for my search for both a satisfactory explanation of how societies and economies work; with what results; and the nature of relevant mechanisms for adjusting what societies judge (through democratic processes) to be unacceptable trends.

I admit to having been attracted in my youth to the British New Left’s analysis of British inequality in the late 1950s - but I was profoundly influenced at University by people such as Karl Popper and his The Open Society and its Enemies, Schumpeter (his Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy and Ralf Dahrendorf; and, at a more practical level, by Andrew Shonfield and Tony Crosland who were also writing then about the benefits of the “mixed economy”.

More recently I have generally been a fan of the writings of Will Hutton (whose stakeholder analysis of UK society was disdained by Tony Bliar on becoming PM). As an academic I was convinced by the critical analysis of UK and US political scientists in the 1970s which went variously under the terms “Limits of the State” or “problems of implementation” and was the softer end of the “public choice school” of institutional economics.

But, unusually, the anarchistic/libertarian sweep of Ivan Illich and Paulo Freire also got to me in the 1970s (which is why I am (unusually) located in the south west quadrant of the political compass). I therefore not only disdained the injunctions of the dominant left and right extremes of British politics of the 1980s but, as an influential Scottish regional politican, used my role to create more open processes of policy-making. Indeed community activitists and opposition politicians were more important partners for me than members of my own party.
I held on to my leading political position on the huge Regional Council simply because I belonged to neither the left or right factions amongst my colleagues but was their natural second choice! The definitions I give in my Sceptic's Glossary reveal the maverick me.

For the past 20 years, however, since I left the UK to work as an adviser on institutional development in central europe and central asia , I have not been involved in politics.
My interest is to find some common ground in all the critiques of the current social and economic malaise – and to develop some consensus about the actions which might be taken.
A paper on my website is an early draft about this.

Ten years On

As the 11th September approaches, more and more articles appear on the significance and effects of the attacks on that day a decade ago. My own article has duly appeared in today’s issue of Revista 22 (for which many thanks to my translator Cristina - and Daniela's subsequent revisions). I start the piece in the following way -

Whatever other effects the attack on the Twin Towers may have had, it certainly provided the opportunity for the security systems of leading States (adrift after the collapse of communism) to regroup and increase their budgets and power. The “war against terrorism” became after September 2001 the slogan behind which many States increased their surveillance and control measures over their own citizens. “Defence” budgets and actions boomed.

I did list some other changes since September 2001 but was concerned to make three basic points – that the damage “neo-liberalism” has done to us is vastly greater than that of Islamic radicalism; that the global financial meltdown has actually strengthened the ideologues of privatisation; and (a non-trend) that the anti-globalisation vision so evident 10 years ago which one might have expected to see come back in strength failed to materialise /
An article in today’s Guardian suggests that one of the most disturbing developments of the post-9/11 world

is the growth of a national security industrial complex that melds together government and big business and is fuelled by an unstoppable flow of money. It takes many forms. In the military, it has seen the explosive growth of the contracting industry with firms such as Xe, formerly known as Blackwater, or DynCorp increasingly doing the jobs of professional soldiers. In the world of intelligence, private contractors are hired to do the jobs of America's spies. A shadowy world of domestic security has grown up, milking billions from the government and establishing a presence in every state. From border fences that don't work to dubious airport scanners, spending has been lavished on security projects as lobbyists cash in on behalf of corporate clients.
Meanwhile, generals, government officials and intelligence chiefs flock to private industry and embark on new careers selling services back to government.

The invitation to the Revista 22 special issue was phrased in terms of “how the world has changed since 09/11” which gave scope to write about other things. Social Europe carries a piece from Jo Stiglitz which explicitly deals with the changes which flowed directly from the attack. He focuses on Bush’s response - as do several contributors to the special composium published today by The Guardian.
As we might have anticipated, the most profound set of comments on 09/11 come from Noam Chomsky who basically raises the question about the ethical position of most of those invited to write about the tenth anniversary. “Intellectuals”, he suggests, “are those who play the government tune. Those who criticise government strategies on ethical grounds are labelled terrorists”. It’s a fair point – and he summarises the evidence of the American role in the massacres in various Latin American countries in the latter half of the 20th century as proof.
He accuses most of us of hypocrisy in praising and protecting the dissidents of central europe and yet standing silently by while the few Americans who dared to criticise the American record were vilified.

Saxon villages and fortified churches

A heavenly day – almost literally! She who must be obeyed needed a break from the work she had been doing on and around the house. I reckoned Poiana Merova should have a fair this first Sunday of September – and indeed it did. But such a disappointing one! Cheap chinese baubles; loud music; a few vegetables; and, apart from a pile of aluminium pots, none of the rural instruments I’ve come to expect at fairs. But a sign for Vulkan – mentioned on the map on Saxon fortified churches I had bought in Brasov recently - had us on a stretch of road we had never been on before. And the detour was well worth it. Vulkan village has a clean, lively feel to it – despite the sadly derelict mansion (which turned out to be the German School) on its main street. The young Lutheran pastor gave us a personal tour of the complex – which dates from the 14th century (although the building is 17th). The town was known as Wolkendorf and the enemy was the Hungarians. The complex has been wonderfully restored – with a magnificent organ and superb ceiling and pulpit. Services are held there at 10.00 every 2 weeks in summer (next Sunday is the next) – alternating with the Cristian fortified church. Apparently the services attract 50-70 in summer. In return for my donation I got the annual magazine (in German) and a lovely calendar. It emerged that the derelict school had been leased to a company who had not taken occupation and that the church was now trying to wrest it back from them. Either Bulgaria or Romania, I understood, had a new law which required such patrimony to be properly maintained. Wonder how it deals with a case like this.
Before the day was out we had discovered two more superb old fortified churches from the early medieaval period in our immediate neighbourhood (which I had not previously known about) – Codlea as Zeiden; and Ghimbav as Weidenbach. Cristian (Neustadt), on the Brasov-Rasnov stretch) was already known to us.
Codlea, a few kilometres further on, is on the main road between Brasov and Sibiu – and our guide at its church was a young student who alternated between Romanian and German in her explanations. She left the treasure for the end – a small exhibition of paintings by a local artist Eduard Morres (1894-1980) whose realistic genre is precisely my preferred one. I was able to buy what seemed the last copy of a substantial book on him (in German) with lots of reproductions – but, sadly, can find no pictures online.
A black mark has to go the third place we tried to visit – Ghimbav whose front door was firmly closed and the large notice board on the left bereft of any information about its opening hours. The municipal notice board round the corner was equally unhelpful. After some conversations we eventually established that the key could be obtained from the house further to the left of the church’s front entrance. But that will be for another day.
For a very good sense of what these fortified churches and saxon villages offer see this booklet on Viscri which is just north of Fagaras

Saxon Greenway seems to be a good example of ecological tourism in the Sighosoara area.

Islamism - lessons from Marxism

The Romanian journal Revista 22 which is carrying my article this coming week is rated the country’s finest political and cultural weekly with prestigious contributors from Romania and abroad. It is actually considered a free market advocate specialising in in-depth political and socio-economic analysis – so it will be interesting to see how my piece will go down – criticising as it does the dismantling of state functions of the neo-liberals. But I am careful to emphasise in my conclusion the naivety of both left and neo-cons since the issue for me is getting and retaining a balance between the powers of corporations, government and the people. As Henry Mintzberg (2000) and Colin Crouch (2011) argue, the balance is at the moment horrifically with corporate interests whose funding of think-tanks has made many people believe. It is, of course, one thing to argue about state functions in the older member states; quite another to argue about them in Southern Europe where the state is a bit of a joke. I need to deal with this issue sometime in the future.
Founded after the 1989 revolution by liberal intellectuals from the Group For Social Dialogue, the 22 of the title refers to December 22nd 1989, the day Nicolae Ceaucescu fled the Communist party’s Central Committee building by helicopter following the incidents at Timişoara which led to his downfall.
Next week’s issue will be a special issue on the decade after 07/11 and I deliberately gave this (and Islamic terrorism) only a passing reference – putting it in the context of shared corporate and state interests and the failure of the anti-globalisation forces to use the opportunity of the financial meltdown.
The New Republic is an excellent journal I seldom mention. Like most of the global media, they too are running a special issue on 09/11 (unfortunately behind a pay-wall). But one of the contributions - Do ideas matter?– looks carefully at Islamic militancy in the wider context of the animosities that liberal societies arouse from time to time -

By liberal societies, I meant societies of the kind that encourage people to think rationally and creatively for themselves, and try to protect everyone’s right to do so, instead of demanding, as non-liberal societies do, that everyone adhere to the venerable and bow to the hierarchical. Liberal societies have been growing for the last couple of centuries, and liberal principles have been spreading around the world. But liberalism’s progress has also turned out to be, for a great many people, humiliating and terrifying, not to mention disastrous, on occasion. The liberal enterprise has kept on swelling, even so—and among the people who have felt outraged or frightened, the dynamism and the evident attractiveness of liberal principles around the world have sometimes generated panic, too, along with a suspicion that gigantic and sinister conspiracies must be at work. And the frightened people have rebelled. Sometimes they rebelled in the hope of preserving the past, a theme for peasants and artisans; and sometimes in the hope of merely expressing themselves, a theme for poets.
But in Europe in the years after World War I, the rebellions also broke out in the form of well-organized mass political movements with revolutionary aspirations. These were movements of the extreme right, or the extreme left, or right and left at once. But mostly these were movements of the avant-garde. The founders were typically charismatic intellectuals who knew how to paint their doctrines in the colors of the future, which was thrilling. And the leaders recounted grand mythologies of world history. The surface details in those mythologies varied from movement to movement.
Still, if you looked beneath the surface, the mythologies tended to be the same. They told a story about a virtuous and superior population that had come under attack from a cosmic conspiracy of foreign enemies and internal subversives. The virtuous and superior population would shortly wage apocalyptic war to fend off the foreign enemies and to exterminate the subversives. And, after the apocalypse, the virtuous and superior population would resurrect an ancient empire from the Golden Age, except in a high-tech modern version—a perfect utopia offering a solution to all of life’s problems, which liberalism does not try to do. The mythology ended, in short, at totalitarianism.

The Islamist and Baathist obsessions about imperialist and Zionist plots, the calls for a utopian resurrection of the ancient Caliphate of yore (which meant theocracy for the Islamists and one-party rule for the Baath), the massacres that followed the Islamist and Baath movements like a shadow—all this seemed, from my lookout perch, entirely recognizable. Here were the worst parts of twentieth-century Europe, creatively adapted to the traditions and circumstances of the Middle East.
The whole history of the Marxist guerrilla movement had demonstrated that, if you can assemble even a modest cadre from among the well-educated, and you can motivate the members to forsake their privileges and comforts and trek into the badlands or the mountains, the cadre will always be able to recruit the wretched of the earth into the battalions of your insurgent army. And you can send those recruits to their deaths, regardless of the name of your cause or the preposterousness of its ideology or its prospects of success.
The Islamist movement was founded in Egypt in 1928, but it also got started more or less independently in other places over the next few years, and its overall progress has been relatively slow, compared with the amazing speed of the European totalitarian movements in their day. Islamism has ended up more loosely structured, as a result. Still, Islamism, too, is a product of charismatic intellectuals. Islamism may well be the most purely intellectual movement of all. Islamism reveres its scholars. The entire power of the movement, its mainstream mass organizations and its jihadi battalions alike, rests on the leaders’ ability to hypnotize large publics into believing that only the Islamist scholars, through their exegetical insights into sacred texts, can penetrate the mystery of what you should do today and tomorrow. That is the meaning of “Islam is the solution.”
But this merely suggests that Islamism offers one more instance of the independent power of ideas—in Islamism offers one more variation on a recognizably modern impulse, which is the avant-garde urge to rebel against liberal ideas and customs—if this is true even in a modest degree, then it makes sense to emphasize the importance of argument and criticism, including arguments and criticisms from outside the Muslim community. Although no one can doubt that, in the matter of argument, the insiders of the Muslim world, and not the outsiders, will make the most persuasive points.
The progressive thinkers from Muslim backgrounds, the people who have chosen to retain their religious identity and the people who have chosen to foreswear it, the people who have experienced for themselves the atmosphere of the Muslim Brotherhood and its fraternal organizations, the jihadis who have contemplated their course in life and have elected to become thoughtful and articulate exjihadis, the people who know what it is to be locked in an Egyptian jail, the people who find no difficulty in invoking in a single breath their own experiences and the principles of John Stuart Mill, the people who know how to distinguish a genuine feminism from the Islamist variety—these people, the Muslim liberals (or liberal ex-Muslims, as the case may be), will turn out to be the counterparts of the Soviet and Eastern Bloc dissidents. All the efforts of American commandos and drones notwithstanding, they are the ones who will bring the movement down.

Today's Observer carries the latest in the story of health reform in the UK.

Words

I have always been fond of TS Eliot’s Four Quartets not only for its Zen like sense of time and the puniness of our efforts but for its references to the fragile nature of words – thus, in the first poem (Burnt Norton)
Words strain,
Crack and sometimes break, under the burden,
Under the tension, slip, slide, perish,
decay with imprecision, will not stay in place
You can read the entire poem here
and later (in East Coker) a section I use a lot -

So here I am, in the middle way, having had twenty years
Trying to learn to use words, and every attempt
Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure
Because one has only learnt to get the better of words

Little wonder, therefore, that Eliot was a great admirer of a little-known poet from my home town (Greenock) in the 1940s, WS Graham who also wrote a lot about words eg

Speaking is difficult and one tries
To be exact, and yet not to
Exact the prime intention to death.
On the other hand, the appearance of things
Must not be made to mean another
thing. It is a kind of triumph
To see them and to put them down
As what they are. The inadequacy
Of the living, animal language drives
Us all to metaphor and an attempt
To organise the spaces we think
We have made occur between the words.

These poets’ emphasis on the inadequacy of words came to mind as I thought about the 2 hours we spent last night checking the translation of the short article I had duly submitted to Revista 22. The problems started with the title – The Dog that didn’t bark. Romanian has apparently 2 ways of saying this – one of which apparently makes it clear that the dog might have been expected to bark. “Society” had caused a problem – since it has both a social and commercial meaning. The phrase “political leadership” (as in “absence of”) apparently has a stronger meaning in English than in Romanian where it seems to be a more neutral phrase. My phrase about our “becoming customers rather than citizens” needed in Romanian a clearer steer that – ie that we had not necessarily chosen the development. The most interesting was perhaps the word “meltdown” which can refer either to “thaw” (positive) or nuclear disaster!

And now my favourite Romanian poem! Titled ASKING TOO MUCH? by Marin Sorescu

‘Suppose that, to give a few lectures,
daily you had to commute
between Heaven and Hell:
what would you take with you?’

‘A book, a bottle of wine and a woman, Lord.
Is that asking too much?’

‘Too much. We’ll cross out the woman,
she would involve you in conversations,
put ideas into your head,
and your preparation would suffer.’

‘I beseech you, cross out the book,
I’ll write it myself, Lord, if only
I have the bottle of wine and the woman.
That’s my wish and my need. Is it too much?’

‘You’re asking too much.
What, supposing that daily,
to give a few lectures, you had
to commute between Heaven and Hell, would
you take with you?’

‘A bottle of wine and a woman,
if I may make so free.’
‘That’s what you wanted before, don’t be obstinate,
it’s too much, as you know. We’ll cross out the woman.’

‘What do you have against her, why do you persecute her?
Cross out the bottle rather,
wine weakens me, almost leaves me unable
to draw from my loved one’s eyes
inspiration for those lectures.’

Silence, for minutes
or an eternity.
Respite. In which to forget.

‘Well, suppose that to give
a few lectures you had to commute
daily between Heaven and Hell:
what would you take with you?’

‘A woman, Lord, if I may make so free.’
‘You’re asking too much, we’ll cross out the woman.’
‘In that case cross out the lectures rather,
cross out Hell and Heaven for me,
it’s either all or nothing.
Useless and vain my commuting would be between Heaven
and Hell.
How could I even begin to frighten and awe
those poor creatures in Hell -
without teaching aid, the woman?
How strengthen the faith of the righteous in Heaven -
without the book’s exegesis?
How endure all the differences
in temperature, light and pressure
between Heaven and Hell
if I have no wine
on the way
to give me a bit of courage?’

from Selected Poems by Marin Sorescu, translated by Michael Hamburger. Published in 1983 by Bloodaxe Books. www.bloodaxebooks.com

Drisle; Good governance; Germany; and the art of Depression

The almost cloudless skies which greeted us on our arrival here on 10 August have had a 3 week spell and ended only yesterday. Today has become increasingly gloomy (the grey mist is sweeping down from Piatra Craiului), windy and drissly – ideal weather for catching up on the internet after our entertaining of the last 12 days. The first thing which I encountered was the World Bank’s People, Space, Deliberation website to which I am sent alerts every week or so. Today a blog about some jargon caught my attention. The blog and a couple of generous responses showed blogging at its best – with an interesting new development blog and a couple of papers being offered up.

I got to thinking a bit more about the distinction between the field of democratization studies and the field of good governance studies. With respect to the former, there is a longstanding and well-referenced theoretical literature pertaining to political transitions, and a good number of competing "theories of change," each with its own backers, detractors, and robust line of argumentation.
But the concept of "good governance" is a bit fuzzier when you look at it from an academic point of view. What exactly do we mean by the term? Is it democratization "lite?" Is it some combination of voice, accountability, service delivery and state responsiveness without explicit political competition? If so, what is the particular value that this construct brings to the conversation? And, as is often brought up in conversations within the Bank and elsewhere, what exactly is the "theory of change" (or multiple theories of change) underpinning this work? As far as I can tell, the bulk of the literature relating to good governance is either drawn from subsets of the democratization literature, or is made up largely of donor-conducted or donor-funded research - that is, case studies and other applied research designed explicitly to extract lessons learned and best practices to improve implementation in the field. Perhaps the field of "good governance" is significant then mainly as an applied rather than a theoretical construct - in which case it is no wonder that we often come up against the thorny "theory of change" issue.
All this was buzzing somewhat chaotically through my head when I stumbled across a ten year old IDS paper on citizen voice, Bringing citizen voice and client focus into service delivery,by Anne Marie Goetz and John Gaventa. Despite its age, the paper reads like a fresh attempt to clarify the issue of citizen voice by: a) focusing explicitly on citizen voice in service delivery; b) categorizing "voice and responsiveness" initiatives by type; and c) drawing some preliminary conclusions as to the type of political environment in which such "voice and responsiveness" issues may be likely or unlikely to succeed. The paper contains a wealth of information (albeit now somewhat dated) on various types of service delivery-citizen voice initiatives, and for the categorization exercise alone is of value to anyone seeking to better understand how such issues may be usefully broken down and analyzed. For me, though, the most interesting section is the conclusion, in which the paper frames questions for further research that hinge directly on explicitly addressing the idea of political competition and its implications for citizen voice initiatives - "Many participation and responsiveness initiatives are launched with scant consideration of their , relationship to other institutions and processes for articulating voice or engineering state response - namely, political parties and political competition," the report notes. "The research in this report indicates that political competition strongly influences the way citizen concerns are articulated and the way public agencies respond." However, it goes on to say, the relationship between political competition, voice initiatives and responsiveness initiatives is poorly understood. It is a shame that, ten years on, these statements still seem accurate within the context of applied research on "good governance." Setting aside academic theory, if we are serious about achieving results in this field, it seems we would all do well at the very least to acknowledge these issues head-on rather than hide behind fuzzily articulated concepts.

I haven’t had a chance to read the second paper mentioned in the discussions which is Managing pubic finance and procurement in fragile and conflicted settings

I’ve referred before to the great posts which Michael Lewis of Vanity Fair does about countries in the maelstrom of the financial hurricane of the past three years. He has now moved on from Greece and Ireland to the more challenging territory of… Germany with which he clearly has some problems understanding. The comments (which rightly condemn the cheapness of his remarks) are worth reading.
Because of Vodaphone’s incompetent and uncaring policies I can’t upload the paintings which I normally have adorn the blog. But let me refer my readers to a great blog posting about the highly civilised way in which the USA dealt with its last great depression. Sad that contemporary leadership cannot rise to such inspired heights.
And also a link to one of my favourite art galleries in Sofia.

The Dog that didn't bark

I delivered this morning my contribution to the special issue which the Revista 22 journal is running next week to mark the 10th anniversary of 09/11. I changed the title to "The Dog that didn't bark" (the title of a Sherlock Holmes episode)to refer to the strange inability of all those active in the anti-globalisation movement 10 years ago (so well described in Paul Kingsnorth’s One No, Many Yeses (Free Press 2003) to use the global financial crisis to present an alternative vision - let alone mobilise people for change. Previous posts carried the initial text for the article - it now continues -

Democracy requires political and administrative systems to have the capacity to make an impact on what its citizens judge to be unacceptable conditions. But it’s not only governments, corporate power and the media which are failing us – propelling us faster toward the precipice. We are actually failing ourselves. Our collective will to act as local, national and international citizens has weakened enormously over the past decade – despite our being presented in the financial crises of the past few years with the most powerful evidence for systemic change. In 1999 we had the Seattle anti-globalisation demonstrations and annual conferences. But, after the Genoa Conference of 2001, the movement disintegrated. Why? For, as the various financial scandals (eg Enron) of the 2000s culminated in the global meltdown of 2008, it seemed that the scales dropped at last from everyone’s eyes. The neo-liberal Emperor had been exposed in all his nakedness. So surely we now had the shared political understanding and will to return to the State some at least of the functions which had been stripped from it by those under the influence of dogma.
Indeed for a moment there seemed the possibility of developing greater legitimacy for alternative social visions more consistent with basic principles of democracy and collective dialogue and action. Not only did this not happen - but the high ground, amazingly, was quickly recaptured by corporate warriors who saw the State rescue of the banking system as an opportunity to “reframe” the agenda for their benefit. State debts had increased and had therefore, went their argument, to be reduced – but through the dismemberment of the last vestiges of the civilising aspects of state activities. Colin Crouch is one of the few who has recently identified and analysed the perversity of this stunning development (in his brilliantly titled book The Strange Non-death of Neoliberalism (Polity 2011) – pointing out, for example, the confusion large corporations have successfully sown in the public mind as they use the language of “the market” to defend their anti-competitive (let alone anti-social) practices. Richard Douthwaite put it very pithily in his 2003 Short Circuit The system that has emerged suits nobody: in the long run, there are no winners. Even at the highest levels of society, the quality of life is declining. The threat of mergers leaves even senior managers in permanent fear of losing their jobs. As for the burgeoning list of billionaires, try though they might to fence themselves off from the collapsing social order, they cannot hide from the collapsing biosphere. Neither social democratic nor green opposition parties offer, however, any convincing agendas for change. Such agendas are available (A draft paper Working for Posterity on my website identifies many of them) but need to be proselytised by those who recognise that the issue is not the simplistic one of greater State power but rather the need for a proper balance of power between corporations, state structures and people-driven political processes. “It was not capitalism which triumphed when the Berlin wall fell – it was balance” was the opening sentence of a powerful but neglected 2000 article by management guru Henry Mintzberg which set the European model of the “mixed economy” - of the “strong private sector, strong public sector and strength in the sectors between” - against the lack of balance and of “countervailing power” in the so-called communist societies. “The current push to privatise everything will”, he warned then, “lead to the same disease as communist societies”. It is the apparent powerlessness in the face of disaster which is the most frightening of current trends.

The new terrorists

Trying to do justice to the question of how the world has changed in the past decade in 1,000 words is, to put it mildly, rather challenging! I should probably assume that other contributors to this special issue of the Romanian journal Revista 22 will have covered the obvious issues – and try to make a couple of distinctive points. So what should my line be? I thought that I might go for a heading like “The New Terrorists” and suggest that the damage the neo-liberal ideologues and financial class have done to societies is so enormous that this is the term we should apply in future to them. I’m sure I’m not the first to have thought of this – but it does seem a powerful phrase which brings together several arguments – eg Chomsky’s “manufactured consensus” (media and state manipulation of our perceptions); that people (in the developed world) feel less secure not because of islamic terrorists but because the old certainties of jobs and welfare have disappeared; and public values, space and decency are declining. Richard Douthwaite’s most recent book put this well -

As individuals, we face increasing insecurity in our working lives, on our streets and even within our homes. As societies, we face a ruthlessly competitive global economy, the threat of armed conflict, and a biosphere stressed to the point of collapse. Why is the world's climate becoming ever more unstable? Why is democracy slipping away, and ethnic conflict, poverty, crime and unemployment growing day by day? The root cause of all these problems often evades even the most intelligent and well-intentioned examination

.A fundamental question, of course, is how we notice and measure “change”. Any list of the ways in which the world seems to have changed in the last decade would include -
• The scale of migrations – caused by both economic and military circumstances
• The scale of natural disasters
• Breakdown of the international financial system
• Changes in social behaviour caused by the internet
• The rise of China
• Increased disillusionment with political action (due to the continued grip of Neo-liberalism )
• Growth of inequality and insecurity

There are, however, several problems with such a listing. First this is a rather partial and ethnocentric picture. The list refers mainly to disturbances to the comfortable western (mainly European) world. The net needs to be cast wider – to recognise, for example, that many countries in South American and Africa have seen positive political and economic developments since 2001. Hundreds of millions of people have also been lifted from poverty throughout the world (although the squalid and fragile urban conditions in which most of them live might lead some to question the significance of this index). The Arab spring may have challenged the view many had of Arab and Muslim fatalism but we have become less optimistic about the onward march of democracy. It is not just that the various tulip and other revolutions of the 2000s stalled; it is also the growing disillusionment with democracy in Europe
The metaphor of the fishing net takes us to the second issue – the way we measure change. Our view of the world is determined both by the images we get from the frenetic global media and by our fixation on the familiar. The deeper the change, the less we are likely to notice it. Historian EH Carr put it this way –

facts are like fish swimming about in a vast and sometimes inaccessible ocean; and what we catch will depend partly on chance, but mainly on what part of the ocean we choose to fish in and what tackle we chooses to use - these two factors being, of course, determined by the kind of fish we want to catch. By and large, we will get the kind of facts we want

.We have become fixated in the last decade on indices – for example about “good governance” and, even more recently, “happiness”. But just think of the process by which statistics about such crimes as rape and “domestic assault” have developed. When I was a magistrate in a Scottish working class town the early 1970s, “wife beating” was accepted by most circles as a natural behaviour of hard-working and drinking men (particularly unemployed or on casual work). And the incidence of rape depends on social inclinations to report it – which are lower in traditional societies than in modern cities.

Travails, conversations and travels

A new nip in the air last Wednesday night and Thursday morning – and a strong breeze. Excellent weather for scything. And I was initiated into the real scythe sharpening – with a small, very tough iron anvil as the base on which the scythe blade is held as it is hammered by a small hammer. For the serious professional, working 14 hours a day (for 30 euros), this needs to be done at least 3 times – depending on how many molehills there are! For the first time, I had a family team to help the process - with great chat ("crack" for the Irish) afterwards.
Saturday I took the kids back to Bucharest via Campulung, the apple valley and Tyrgovishte – with a brief tour of the flat and the People’s Palace. Sunday was relaxed with a visit to The English Bookshop; the usual friendly reception (unsolicited cups of coffee) and, this time, two great books - the first volume of John Fowles' The Journals; and a 2006 paperback edition of Faber's superb 1992 "Twentieth-Century Scottish Poetry" edited by Douglas Dunn. This is THE collection whcih not only does justice to the voices of that century - but contains a highly informative (and poetic) introduction.
And, while on the subject of Scottish writing, here's a nice discussion on the subject of contemporary Scottish writing - if a bit superficial and ahistorical

what changed in the naughts?

Faute de mieux, I have received an invitation to write a short article for the prestigious Romanian journal Revista 22 on "the world ten years after 09/11”. I will use the blog for some brainstorming in the next few days – and would very much appreciate some comments from my readers.
The attack on the Twin Towers certainly provided the opportunity for the security interests in leading States (adrift after the collapse of communism) to regroup and increase their budgets and power. "Counter-terrorism” became the slogan behind which the State increased various surveillance and control measures over its own citizens. Defence (aggression) budgets and actions boomed; powers of detention without legal redress were increased; a generation of young muslims radicalised; and cultural tensions increased.
But the 2011 attack was by no means the only significant event over the decade. Arguably, indeed, governments and media have used the threat of terrorism to distract us all from vastly greater threats to our security and social harmony which have developed as neo-liberalism has grown apace and threatened to destroy the democratic model which was so painfully constructed in the the 20th century.

medieval Brasov

One of my daughters is visiting me (for the first time) in my Carpathian mountain house at the moment; and this has taken me into the heart of medieval Brasov for the first time for some years – seeing it not only in its new splendour but through new eyes. I normally sweep round past the Central Station on the circuit road to one of the large consumer outlets (god forgive me) but this time I took them up past the Saxon houses on Strada Lunga to the elegant square and the huge Black Church (with its Ottoman rug collection) and back via an equally graceful old road. A later walk uncovered a terrific German bookshop at the Black Church where I was able to buy many excellent guides to the area – particularly to the fortified churches. When I first visited Brasov in 1991, it still boasted 2 German newspapers and I could hear German spoken in the streets. But Kohl’s financial blandishments to the Saxon population sadly emptied the villages around here – the vaccum being filled by the gypsies. The old houses are only slowly being rescued – a visit to a winery gave the chance to see the lovely courtyards and cellars which grace the Saxon houses.