European conversations

A lot of anxieties have been expressed in books and articles in revent years about what the internet is doing to us eg our minds and relationships – and this recent article gave a good overview.
And Martin Kettle wrote recently about how the Net is increasingly making native English speakers, if not exactly Europhobic, certainly Euro-ignorant.
One of the several excellent bloggers I came across yesterday - John Nnaughton - summarised it nicely -

This autumn we will be bombarded with news about the US midterm elections. Fair enough. These are significant elections in the world's most powerful country. But if we are to be intelligent and rounded beings we also need to be well informed about and engaged with elections in places much nearer to home, and especially those that arguably have more to tell us about the temper of the times in our part of the world – like those in Sweden next month – above all. But that is not going to happen as long as we are voluntarily imprisoned in the Anglosphere. Yesterday, once again, the latest UK generation got fewer A-levels in French, German, Russian and Spanish than the generation before. Next week, there will be fewer GCSEs in modern languages too. The trend is inexorable. We are cutting ourselves off from the world. Another New Yorker cartoon, this time by Robert Mankoff, comes irresistibly to mind. A woman is talking to a man at a cocktail party. She asks: “One question: if this is the information age, how come nobody knows anything?” The answer is simple. They are speaking to us from outside the Anglosphere but we no longer understand them.

And, of course, my own blogroll proves the point. I do have excellent French – and passable German – so there really is no excuse for me. To be fair I did, last week, dowload a couple of German book sites – and do subscribe to Der Spiegel (which sends me daily articles in English); to Eurozine which covers european cultural matters and which have translations of articles from about 70 small european journals; and also to Sight and Sound. ButI need to be more proactive - the least I can do from henceforward is to read more diligently the blog of people like dodo - who is on the EuroTribine website which covers aspects of current affairs in individual Eurpoean nations. Paul Mason of the BBC also seems to roam beyond Britain’s shores – see this piece of his on the Spanish financial situation.
By the way, the dodo link gives an information packed briefing on the development of bullet trains in China – an excellent case study in what that country can achieve when it turns its mind to it. Good pics as well.

I thought I would check what European blogs were on offer on google – and was disappointed initially to find that the blogs which were rated in the 2009 Euro Wiki blog competition were all very glitzy and shallow things.

But I did across this site whose concept is very good – creating a network of people in European cities commited to sharing insights about life where they live. /
The last entry, however, of the Bucharest site was in 2007!
Difficult to find a painting illustrating the internet - the only appropriate one I cd find is this one by Gauguin - gossipers'conversation!

schools and what they do to you

Here ‘s a nice job – wandering the streets of different European cities and taking photos to illustrate the fashion styles! You can catch the result on Face Style.In fact, I do very much enjoy looking at the theatre which faces in streets give us and sometimes wish that I had the camera with me and was able to catch a face surreptitiously. So well done the Guardian!
A nice example in the Observer of how a serious but well-worn subject can be brought to life with satire and good writing. In this case, the subject is the respective value of schools and universities.
Mitchell has a jaundiced view of schooling and some sympathy apparently with parents who do their own schooling. Inevitably he gets a high response rate to his article (everyone is an expert on education!) – and some good points eg

School teaches you to cope with boredom. It helps you to appreciate your free time. It introduces you to the idea of a working day from an early age, and gives you structure and (important for kids) stability. It teaches you how to deal with conflict, who to avoid, how to cope with really horrible situations then go home afterwards. School (especially with regard to uniform) is a great leveller, and, valuably, is often so rubbish that you're actually glad to reach adulthood.

Personally school was a valuable experience for me. I had the feeling that 1955-60 was the end of a golden period for state schools. We still had streaming – with an examination at age 11 determining whether you went to a the prestige high school – or the secondary modern. Teachers there wore gowns and most commanded fear and respect - even (or particularly) the characters amongst them eg the great English teacher who would frequently raise high his desk lid in front of him to seek solace in a whig of whisky! Classes were small - and almost all the members of our final group went on to make something of their lives eg a national theatre director (Bill Bryden), a star Chelsea footballer (Charlie Cooke), a BBC designer (Alex Gourlay), a paedetrician (Cameron Shepherd), an American academic (Rhoda Urie) etc
Of course, streaming was unfair and wasteful of national talent – and was abolished in the 1960s. And I did later develop an enthusiasm for the anarchistic ideas of Ivan Illich – as set out in his Deschooling Society. And, if you want more on this fascinating writer of the 1970s I have just noticed a festschrift.
The painting is by a Russian realist - Bogdanov Belsky

consultant waste, claustrophobia in China

Today’s Guardian carries a story that the UK Health Service spent 300 million pounds last year on management consultants – equal to the cost of 10,000 nurses.

In London alone managers shelled out more than £114m last year on management consultants – almost double what they had spent two years previously and £30m more than the money spent on breast cancer services in the capital. Costs were inflated, say critics, by the consultants' salaries, which were reportedly as much as £1,000 a day. Experts have questioned whether the government gets "any value at all" from the private sector. Last year a report by McKinsey & Company proposed sacking 10% of NHS staff – some 137,000 people – to help achieve planned £20bn efficiency savings in the health service, and warned that GP time "lost to tea breaks" should be reduced as part of a scheme to improve "GP productivity" to the tune of £400m

Two or three books have been written about the incredible sums of money the New Labour government spent on management consultants.

I mentioned yesterday that I had come across some great new (development) blogs but gave the address of only one (Owen)whose CV is one of the most interesting I’ve come across in recent years – on secondment in Africa from the UK International Development Department – with a strong academic bent and keenness to share his reading.
One of the leading figures in the academic development world is Simon Maxwell of the UK’s Overseas development Institute and his website contains not only a blog but copies of his extensive publications. It was from this that I learned of the recent EU Reflections report which is worth a look.
The third very useful blog I came across was that of Chris Blattman - an American academic

I have not so far mentioned that one of the things which really fazed me when I arrived in Beijing at the beginning of this year is that I could not access either my website or blog. I should not have been surprised since the tiff with Google was at its height. But it was one of two factors which made me feel, for the first time in my life, really claustrophobic The other factor was the approaching Chinese New Year – and the daily news on local TV of the congestion on trains and planes as 150 million plus people went home or (the richer ones) on vacation to Europe. I wanted out of this place – and knew that it would not be easy!
But the blocking of Google Scholar and most blogs (including my own) really did make me feel that I was in a prison. The world suddenly shrunk and I was trapped with huge buildings towering around me. I was denied, for example, the essays of Daniel Bell about aspects of China; and would not have been able to discover, as I did yesterday, a 250 page PhD thesis about policy implementation in China

Carpe Diem

In the last 24 hours I have been buying Amazon books as if there were no tomorrow. Some 36 will be winging their way to the mountains in the next few weeks – not counting the 15 or so which are scheduled to arrive in the next week. At my age, one can only count one’s blessings and access as much as one can.
I got on a dangerous roll when I dipped into the Amazon recommendations (based on my reading patterns) and found so many of the sort of travelogues I love which mix interviews with background history of the country. A lot of these and history books I’ve ordered cover the Balkans (larger definition) and also central Asia and Caucasus in which I spent 7 creative years. The haul includes several Patrick Leigh Fermor’s I don’t have and Olivia Manning’s Balkan and Levantine trilogies.
I’ve started to read Daniel Bell’s China’s new Confucianism whose intro semed rather to undermine its thesis when it indicated that, for the moment, the new-found respectability of Confucius is only verbal. It does not extend, as he wrly puts it, to elderly people having one vote for their leaders let alone the multiple vote which might be implied by the confucianist respect for the wisdom of the aged.
One of the most distasteful aspects of contemporary China is the complete disrespect of the forces of law and order for the law and of the rights of the ordinary citizen. I had read a lot about the collusion of municipalities with developers and the ruthless way villagers and townfolk alike have been and are brutally evicted from their homes to make way for the new buildings which now blight the country.
Lawyers who try to defend the people are thrown into prison.

A country the size of China, of course, cannot be run from the centre – the Provincial Chiefs (who have a majority of power on the party’s central presidium) dominate. An article in the Foreign Policy journal put the matter starkly -

Consider how aggressively Chinese cities have now begun to bypass Beijing as they send delegates en masse to conferences and fairs where they can attract foreign investment. By 2025, China is expected to have 15 supercities with an average population of 25 million (Europe will have none). Many will try to emulate Hong Kong, which though once again a Chinese city rather than a British protectorate, still largely defines itself through its differences with the mainland. What if all China's supercities start acting that way? Or what if other areas of the country begin to demand the same privileges as Dalian, the northeastern tech center that has become among China's most liberal enclaves? Will Beijing really run China then? Or will we return to a fuzzier modern version of the "Warring States" period of Chinese history, in which many poles of power competed in ever-shifting alliances?

Some great blogs found this morning – in the development field. And one of them has a very helpful series giving useful advice on IT to people like myself. From the latest of these, I was able to download three helpful bits of software.

The woodcut which adourns this post is taken from Frans Masereel’s The City published in 1925 and can be read in its entirety on the link. I’m very fond of old woodcuts – and tried unuccesfully to find in my favourite art bookship in Brussels
(Posada) more Jacques Engelbach woodcuts which I came across in a nice 1927 book I picked up for 1 euro in a Brussels fleamarket in June.

more Transylvanian and Balkan flavour?

The title of this blog is Carpathian Musings since I am now based here in this marvellous mountain range – in its southern sweep in Romania – but a recent incident has made me realise how little about the immediate area or country I mention in the blog. The other blog I started a couple of years ago but which transmogrified into this one contained much more about life in the mountains.
The starting point for today’s story is one of my many book blogs. At one level it is hardly surprising that those who read should also want to share their pleasure – and write about their recent reads in a blog. For me, the discipline of summarising key points in a book fixes them more solidly in my mind – and may actually create a few questions which send me back to a reread or search in another book. But that is for the non-fiction which tends still to be my fare. What I find amazing is the care and love book bloggers devote to the sentences and characters in fiction. I am deeply grateful to those bloggers who reproduce whole chunks of text to give the reader their own sense of a book and of its style – rather than leaving us to rely on an opinion. One of the best such bloggers is Pechorin – who asked recently about central European literature. As someone with a base in the Carpathians I was happy to share a couple of recent overviews I had come across on the subject – but I then decided to add my own blog address to the second comment. But immediately Max (such is his name) graciously acknowledged and promised to look at my blog, I could anticipate his shocked response – “this guy doesn’t really read novels – and where are his musings about the Carpathians?”
Technically the Carpathians sweep from the plains 150 or so kilometres north of the Danube (in which Bucharest is the largest city) to north Romania, up into Ukraine and then across most of Slovakia – and I did blog (however briefly) in June about my latest trip to superb Slovakia.
But the content of this blog belies its title. The focus here is, of course, on issues of public management - since it takes over from the blog I wrote under the “publicadmin reform” rubric. Ideally I should retitle the blog Carpathian Musings about Good Government! But that would make it more difficult for me to celebrate the wines, paintings and mores in an area which extends for me to the other side of the Balkans mountain range which runs across central Bulgaria.
It’s almost exactly twenty years ago that I started my work and nomadic existence in what was then called countries of central and eastern Europe (CCEE). It started with a personal invitation from the Head of WHO’s Public Health Office in Copenhagen (on the basis of my role then in the Healthy Cities network) to identify the scope in the new central europe for developing networks of preventive health. WHO had long had small offices in all these countries and my job was to fly in and spend a week or so talking not only with Ministers and party leaders but with representatives of the new NGOs. One of my most vivid memories is driving in an ambulance to Brasov (just down the road from where I am now) with the young doctor who had been assigned to me in Romania, hearing German being spoken in the streets; talking with both the University Rector and an episcopalian Bishop; and then being driven on to Alba Iulia to talk with the Archbishop of the Orthodox and Catholic Churches. I also had a moving hour long discussion in Bucharest with the old, frail and highly respected Leader of the Peasant party who had recently been released from 20 years’ imprisonment. My WHO tour included a stunning visit to a snowy and blue skied St Petersburg in mid-January - where I remember being shocked by the completely different value system eg that a life had no value (from a bright young woman) or that food should be subsidised and controlled by the municipality. The one capital I was not allowed to visit in this busy 6 month spell in 1991 was Belgrade. Copenhagen knew something the rest of us didn’t about the coming conflict in the Balkans.
And, since that dreadful conflagration, the Balkans have (once more) being marked apart. Indeed those of us in the Technical Assistance business since then have used a threefold classification - central Europe (for countries such as Poland; Czechia, Slovakia, Hungary and Slovenia with their borders with EU countries); CIS or Commonwealth of Independent States (for those to the East which had never experienced capitalism or democracy); and the troublesome Balkans (the countries of ex Federal Yugoslavia and Bulgaria and Romania) where the Ottoman influence was still evident. Not so, of course, here in Transylvania which was not only Austro-Hungarian until the Trianon Treaty but had Saxon immigrants in medieval times. The old border with Ottoman-controlled Wallachia is just at the back of my house!

Anyway, the point of all this is to promise that I will try to give more of a Balkan flavour to this blog – or rather Transylvanian and Bulgarian flavour – not least to counter the impression that I am leading a vicarious life and missing home. Of course, on fine days here, I have a certain hankering for the Clyde and the Argyll hills and a sight of the Hebrideans – but I have no wish to return to the dreary weather! And I follow the politics simply because it’s an easy case-study for me.
As I’ve mentioned the Ottoman influence, let me finish by pointing you to a provocative article on Turkish styles of argument.

In Turkey, it is normal and expected to say that you will do something, have done something, or agree with something when, in fact, you won’t, haven’t, or don’t.Not only is truth here derived from emotion, but the emotions themselves are more intense and more transitory. Arguing a mild difference of opinion by screaming and threatening would come across to Westerners as weak at best, lunatic at worst. Not here. No shame attaches to displays of anger that in the West would result in the issuance of restraining orders. The fights dissipate as quickly as they start; everyone proceeds to drink tea and moistly proclaim their mutual love. The entire incident is then forgotten, except by the American, who is still shaking with rage and nurtures her resentment forever

Thanks to Marian for the photograph of my neighbourhood. Her stunning collection is worth a look.

the seasons change

Apparently August 15th is St Mary’s day (?) after which the season begins its winddown to autumn – and, in the mountains, the change is palpable. The air had a new edge a couple of days ago; the clouds over the mountains which had been absent for a couple of weeks slowly returned yesterday. Good weather for the lads on the roof; but this morning I felt vaguely cold as I woke up at 06.00.

Some horrifying scenes and stats from pollution-infested Beijing to which I almost committed myself earlier in the year for a long sojourn. I have never felt so alienated in a place as I was in Beijing – soulless buildings, luxurious hotels and crushed like a sardine in the metro. Cultural adjustment is not a problem for me – evidence the 7 years in various countries of central Asia which I found fascinating
But I knew that the scale of the city would be difficult to adjust to - particularly after the months I had spent in rural bliss. A lot of ex-pats were enjoying their lives there – but it is essentially for young people. We older people like our creature comforts! But my visit has at least aroused my interest in the fate and role of this country - and books such as Daniel Bell's China's New Confucianiasm vie for my attention me on the shelves.
I’m going through Perry Anderson’s The New Old World – which contains some stunning analyses of France, Germany, Italy and Turkey and good overviews of the European Union literature

back to basics

Back to basics in recent days – scything the grass at the back of the house (but only in the early morning when it is cooler) and organising at last the covering of the wooden schitza rooftiles with motor oil to ensure its properly sealed. We popped in last week to see Gabi who built and installed our drainpiping last autumn – and was happy to come and finish off the roof. The tiles were laid last September (see blog) and have since experienced several months of snow and then of sun. So the first coat of oil was quickly absorbed. And today is cooler – better for the 2 lads up on the roof. I prepared one of my special vegetable soups for them.
Between supplying them with nails, hammer, axe, wood etc, I continue the David Marquand book.

has the public lost trust in government?

A good post in the open Democracy blog about the widespread belief of a secular decline in public trust of government. Apparently in the US, there may be some evidence of that – but, in Europe, evidence of a continuous erosion in citizens’ satisfaction with the democratic process is absent altogether. Rather than a continuous a decline, the European Commission’s Eurobarometer surveys reveal only trendless fluctuation, and, if anything, even upward tendencies, notably in the Benelux, France, and Italy (see Figure 2 of paper). As the author argues –

Interestingly, some outliers do exhibit persistently lower average levels of satisfaction relative to other countries, suggesting that national political cultures may result in some systematic differences, yet even this didn’t stop satisfaction from rising to historically high levels (see Italy). And, while big drops have occurred, to be sure, as in Denmark in 1985 and Belgium in 1996, these have been temporary and equally punctuated by big increases when satisfaction returned to its previous levels.
Certainly, there are times when politicians and political institutions lose the trust of the public - the parliamentary expense scandals in the UK have, no doubt, had a deleterious effect on public confidence, just as the Italian ‘Tengentopoli’ scandals did in the early 1990s, as well as the skullduggery surrounding Richard Nixon in the 1970s. Such marked fluctuations of public trust over the years show that citizens can become deeply critical of their governments. But there is little evidence that such periodic loses of public trust have led, cumulatively, to a long-term erosion of confidence in politicians, political institutions, or our democratic political systems. Rather than the decline, therefore, political scientists should concentrate on explaining the fluctuation of public trust, its ebb and flow - not just why it falls, but why it rises again. However imperfectly, citizens seem to recognize when institutional improvements take place, and trust can be renewed once the incumbents that violated it are thrown out, and that, in many respects, is what democracy is all about