writing for inspiration and conspiracy

As someone trained in the social sciences - and keen to know what its various disciplines had to contribute to social improvements - I have done my best to keep up with thinking and writing in relevant fields. At least insofar as I can penetrate the dreadful language in which so many social scientists write! Regular readers will know that I am dubious whether the various disciplines in fact deserve to be called “sciences” at all – most of the time they are a collection of hypotheses, opinions and downright ideologies. And the jargon and obfuscated style of writing is simply a stratagem to hide that basic fact. I find it significant that Stanislaw Andreski’s 1972 book Social Sciences as Sorcery has not been allowed a reprint! Here's one quotation which perhaps helps us explain its disappearance!

"The attraction of jargon and obfuscating convolutions can be fully explained by the normal striving of humans for emoluments and prestige at the least cost to themselves, the cost in question consisting of the mental effort and danger of 'sticking one's neck out' or 'putting one's foot in it'. In addition to eliminating such risks, as well as the need to learn much, nebulous verbosity opens a road to the most prestigious academic posts to people of small intelligence whose limitations would stand naked if they had to state what they have to say clearly and succinctly."

The years that students spend in these disciplines may teach them a particular jargon and way of looking at the world; but the more important thing it teaches them is the strange mixture of obedience and arrogance required of those who wish to join the elites of their society. I sometimes think that if we really wanted to change society for the better, we first need to teach people – academics, bureaucrats and citizens alike - certain simple skills of thinking, writing and communicating. I’ve admitted several times here that one of the reasons I do this blog is because the discipline of writing helps me identify questions I would otherwise not be aware of.

 
And I’m composing this particular post because, in the last couple of days, I’ve come across both good and bad examples of writing. First an example of the sort of writing I encountered a lot in post-Soviet countries – piling voluminous fact upon interminable statistic to subjugate the reader into unquestioning silence. It purports to be a study (more than 500 pages) of corruption in the public sector of EU member countries (funded by the EU) but seems rather to be a (very detailed) description of the relevant sections of the various laws which govern corruption. I say “seems” since I do not have the patience to persevere with it after looking at the conclusions on Austria – widely known as one of the most corrupt members – which are so facile and badly written they would not have been allowed into even a newspaper. They did, however, survive the editing process of the EU!

An example of good report writing – at least in terms of the structure of the report – is the Review of Impact and Effectiveness of Transparency and Accountability Initiatives published recently by the Institute of development Studies. I haven't had time to read it yet - but I like the way each section has a basic question as its heading. This gives me a lot of confidence - since everyone (writer, editor and reader) has a reference point by which to judge the text!

Thirty years ago I wrote a short book to try to explain in simple terms for the general public why some major changes being experienced by local government were necessary and trying to demystify the way the system worked. That made me realise how few books were in fact written for this purpose! Most books are written to make a profit or an academic reputation. The first requires you to take a few simple and generally well-known ideas but parcel them in a new way – the second to choose a very tiny area of experience and write about it in a very complicated way.

After that experience, I realised how true is the saying that “If you want to understand a subject, write a book about it”!! Failing that, at least an article – this will certainly help you identify the gaps in your knowledge – and give you the specific questions which then make sure you get the most out of your reading.

My first real publications were chapters in other people’s books and national journals – which described the experiences in community development and more open policy-making processes some of us had introduced into Europe’s largest municipality. I was “sunk”, however, when one journal then asked me to write one page every 4 weeks. I just couldn’t compress my thoughts that way. Although I was reading a lot, I couldn’t write in abstract terms – only about my own experiences, trying to relate them to the more general ideas. I did four pretty good pieces – but then had to pull out. The effort was just taking up too much of my nervous energy. How much I admired the talks of someone like Alaister Cooke – who each week would take a simple incident and weave around it an insightful essay on an aspect of the American political process! Julian Barnes is one of a few who seems to have this gift these days – although my October 2009 blog recognised what Malcolm Gladwell does.

George Orwell’s 1946 essay Politics and the English Language, however, remains my bible.
A rare blog on this issue of the construction of coherent writing can be found here
By the way - "inspire" is the breathe in (life) and "conspire" is to breath with (others). We need a lot more of the oxygen of clear expositions and collective action to achieve the decent life (which some of us have had the luck to experience from time to time).

Rubbish Amazon

After 6 days and about 5 E-mail and 3 telephone conversations (2 at my expense), Amazon are no closer to sorting out the problem I have now ordering their books. Basically all but the most recent books in my basket have disappeared and cannot therefore be ordered. Even when I copy and paste, most of the books disappear and I am left with only 1 or 2 to order. What really annoys me is the lack of continuity in the service support. Every message tells me that I cannot reply to it – and I have to start each complaint afresh. I've tried typing in what a good customer I am - 800 books in the past decade - but their system just goes round and round - not up anywhere! So much for the new service economy!! And the public sector is supposed to ape this sort of call-centre approach?? We should get a life! Come back bureaucracy! All is forgiven!
I was looking at one of my favourite China blogs and came across an intriguing post on the current Belgian crisis from an Indian journalist who has just arrived there from a 6 year posting in Beijing.

The last time elections were held in Belgium in 2007, the country was without a government for almost 300 days. Many believe that before long Belgium is likely to split into separate nations. From an Indian perspective, Belgium’s woes are puzzling. In India, we balance 22 official languages and almost all Indians are multilingual. The diversity that citizens negotiate on a daily basis is moreover scarcely confined to the linguistic. We are a country of lily-white Kashmiris and coffee-hued Malyalis; of fish-eating Bengalis and herbivorous Gujratis. In our “Hindu” country, there are almost as many Muslims as in all of Pakistan. With no single language, ethnicity, religion or food, India’s existence is immensely more complicated than Belgium’s. And yet, somehow, they are unable to function as a nation. The Walloons rarely bother learning Dutch and the Flemings can’t find it in their hearts to live next to French speakers. Meanwhile, the rich north of the country resents spending its hard-earned money to support what they see as the lazy, left-leaning unemployed of the south.
More worrying is what Belgium’s dysfunctionality says about Europe as a whole. Europe is the birthplace of the “nation state.” Carved out of the multi-cultural fabric of the empires that once cut across the continent, modern European countries are based on the idea of one ethnicity, one religion, one language, one nation. Such homogeneity is, of course, an ideal rather than a reality; Spain with its Catalan and Basque minorities being an obvious exception, yet the fundamental idea of “oneness” that underpins European nation states makes negotiating diversity particularly problematic for them. The creation of the European Union (EU), a hugely ambitious project, could have conceivably helped provide solutions to this problem. The EU is polyphonic with 23 official languages and its ideal of “unity in diversity” is identical to that of India. Driven by the idea that in a new world order Europe must find strength in cooperation, thereby ditching old tribal identities, opening up once insular borders to outside influences and demonstrating solidarity with others within the region, the EU could potentially be a model for a post nation-state world and new multicultural identities. But unlike India, which despite occasional communal violence and serial coalition governments, faces the twenty first century with confidence and strength, the EU is floundering. Popular support for the project remains weak. Decades of Europe-wide institution building have largely failed to create a European identity. An even greater failure has been the ability to integrate and absorb non-European ethnicities and religions. Islamophobia is fast on the way to becoming accepted as a mainstream sentiment. Moreover, even the ideal of “solidarity” has been exposed as hollow by the German reaction to the sovereign debt crisis in Greece. The EU faces challenges from every direction. The current turmoil in Belgium exemplifies many of these and the future of this small country might be an indicator of things to come for the EU as a whole. Belgium is a proof of how difficult resolving the cultural gulf between north and south Europe will be. Even within a single country, large-scale transfers of wealth from north to south, in this case Flanders to Wallonia, are so deeply unpopular that they threaten the dissolution of the nation. But, if the Flemish find it impossible to help their own countrywomen, expecting Germany to pay up for the debts of Greece and Portugal is highly unrealistic. Whether Belgium makes it through the next few years intact is unlikely to have major repercussions around the world. But the manner in which Belgium’s future plays out could be a reflection of what path the EU as a whole may go down, the economic and geo-strategic consequences of which will certainly be weighty. In the short term, Belgium’s shenanigans will only be an embarrassment. From July 1, Belgium has taken over the rotating presidency of the EU. Always quick to present itself to others as a model of regional cooperation, the EU is thus presided over by a country that can’t even get its own two communities to co-operate enough to have a government.

Boffy has another good blog on the financial crisis. The painting is by one of Belgium's most famous - James Ensor

Adversarial and consensual systems

It's Independence Day here in Romania - hence the picture - which is taken from a wonderful blog which celebrates cultural aspects of RomaniaTrue Romania organised by a school in Ludus in Translyvania!
Remember that one of the main questions behind these recent musings is – can we really offer advice to (say) the Bulgarians and Romanians about how to develop the capacity of their governance architecture and operations when the countries from which we come have made such a mess of things in our own backyards?

As a Brit I tend to assume, for example, that it is normal for one party to take all government posts – even although it has polled only 40% of the votes cast and perhaps only a quarter of voters. More to the point, I am accustomed to the political arena being an adversarial process from which truth is assumed to emerge from imputation of motives, hostile questioning and a clash of personalities. The Scots, it is reasonable to claim on St Andrew’s Night, are not quite as bad at this as the English – the Scottish Parliament which reassembled (or as we say “reconvened”) in 1999 after a gap of almost 300 years gave us European-style coalitions, committee deliberations and conversations instead of altercations. Although on the hustings it is clear that the old bitterness between Labour and the Scottish nationalists has not gone away.

One of the reasons I never joined Tony Bliar and Gordon Brown in Westminster in 1983 was that I could not take the adversarial nonsense which was and remains the protocol of british political life. In the early 1970s I annoyed people both in my own party and the Liberals (who then controlled Greenock Town Council) by persuading the local Liberal Provost to join with me on some initiative I have now (sadly) forgotten. I just knew that the bipartisan approach was the more effective.

It was the same when I joined up with the leader of the UK Liberal party (Jo Grimond) a year or so later on a(nother) Rowntree Foundation initiative which linked an urban ghetto in my constituency with some work in the marvellous Shetlands Islands.
And few things gave me so much pleasure during my work on Strathclyde Region in the 1980s as collaborative work with the Conservative opposition on issues and strategies of social injustice and exclusion.
I was naïve enough to believe that what mattered was (what I judged to be) the integrity of the individuals I dealt with – but so many of the elected representatives of my own party (whether the John Reids, Jimmy Wrays, George Robertsons (the latter groomed at an early stage let me assure you for his NATO role!) were so obviously looking out for themselves and mouthing the rhetoric of tribal loyalties to get them there.

At age 33, I had gained one of the most powerful positions in Scottish political life – the Secretary of the ruling Labour group which controlled the gigantic Strathclyde Region. Jo Grimond indeed referred to me once wryly as its Gauleiter; and our colleagues used the equally ironic term “gang of four” to describe the four of us who held the top positions! Those were exciting days and I was able to use my position not only to encourage community enterprise but also to introduce a more consensual approach to policy-making – the “member-officer group” which had a group of backbench councillors and middle-level officials examine fields which (generally) ran across departmental lines; take evidence and make recommendations.

I considered myself left of centre and, in in the early 1980s, the main trade union offered me their support to replace the renegade Labour MP in my shipbuilding town. But the party had a quite mad set of policies – including withdrawal from Europe. The manifesto was famously called “the longest suicide note in history” (it was 700 pages long!).
I was reluctant to give up the influential position I had on the Region for the uncertainty and isolation of London; unable to defend the indefensible of the party manifesto and therefore withdrew from the contest. Neither Gordon Brown nor Tony Bliar, it is worth noticing, had any qualms about accepting the terms of the labour party manifesto under which they both reached the UK Parliament in 1983. But then, Bliar was a lawyer – and Brown had set his sights since his early 20s at becoming Prime Minister. I was a contributor (with a critical piece on the operation of Labour groups!) to Gordon Brown’s famous 1975 Red Paper when he was still student Rector of Edinburgh University – a good paper here describes his career. I found a good quote on political ambition recently

Our system obliges us to elevate to office precisely those persons who have the ego-besotted effrontery to ask us to do so; it is rather like being compelled to cede the steering wheel to the drunkard in the back seat loudly proclaiming that he knows how to get us there in half the time. More to the point, since our perpetual electoral cycle is now largely a matter of product recognition, advertising, and marketing strategies, we must be content often to vote for persons willing to lie to us with some regularity or, if not that, at least to speak to us evasively and insincerely. In a better, purer world—the world that cannot be—ambition would be an absolute disqualification for political authority.

These personal vignettes may seem a distraction from the main theme – of the capacity of government – but too much political discussion fails to recognise that politics (like life) is a series of individual choices, decisions and behaviour in a particular context.

It is too easy to retreat behind abstractions. Of course there was an element of cowardice in not wanting to give up the (relative) security of my Glasgow position for the loneliness and uncertainty of being one of 600 Westminster MPs – but I have never regretted the decision. Temperamentally I anguish over issues – and would never have been able to give the instant opinions the career required. 

I am an agnostic in more than religion! And, in continuing at the Region until 1990 or so, I was able to help set up and embed policies which the new Scottish Parliament has continued.

I always felt that the British system was too polarised - not only in class and political terms but in the way it forced both politicians and officials to choose between local or national government. Why not both – a la France? Local politicians there can also be national deputies – despite the backlash against the cumul des mandates. And officials in some countries can move between national and local positions – ensuring a better mutual understanding.

Consensuality, of course, has various dimensions – and perhaps one of the most crucial differences is that between policy on the one hand and the spoils of office on the other. Countries such as Austria, Belgium and Netherlands have long been famous for their spoils system – with Ministries and appointments of officials being shared out according to the share of the poll.

The Dutch Pillar system has declined in importance but the spoils system in Austria and Belgium led to deep corruption. Scandinavian consensuality, on the other hand, seems to be based on moral respect. The ruling party is willing to listen to and negotiate with others.
From my stay in Beijing, I know that some of the Chinese government elite are certainly interested in the Scandinavian perspective. And both in practice and in academia the Swedes and Norwegians have carved their own way – separate from the anglo-saxon social sciences.

The Norwegian academic Tom Christensen's various papers - with their concern about the effects of administrative reform on democracy, for example, are typical. And the Swedish Quality of Governance centre offers more useful reflections on government capacity than its British counterparts.

Democratic Discontents

Warning! This is a long post!
Questions about the capacity of government in general and the political system in particular has been prominent recently on the blog. Three years ago, Gerry Stoker published a book which tried to address this issue - summary of argument here. British government is one of the most studied in the world. For a relatively small country, its combination of history, empire, flexible constitution, liberal politics and (global) language has given its outpourings about the nature and effects of its various political and administrative structures and processes a global impact.

And yet I am struck with the absence of realistic and critical studies of the efficacy of the British governance arrangements at this point in the 21st Century. I have thought long and hard – and can produce only four analyses which might be read with benefit by the concerned and perplexed in that country. Two are 10 years old – the other two 5 years old.

We have, of course, countless academic studies of the operation of the British Parliament, of political parties, of voting systems, of local government, of devolved arrangements, of the civil service, of public management (whether Ministries, core exectuve, agencies), of the Prime Minister’s Office, of the European dimension etc – and a fair number of these are reasonably up-to-date. But most of it is written for undergraduates – or for other academic specialists who focus on one small part of the complex jigsaw. There is so very little which actually tries to integrate all this and give a convincing answer to the increasing number of citizens who feel (like Craig Murray recently) that there is no longer any point in voting; that politicians are either corrupt or hopelessly boxed in by global finance and corporate interests.

I used the epithet “realistic” above in order to distinguish the older studies which painted a rather ideal picture of the formalities of the system (what the 19th century Walter Bagehot called the “dignified”parts) from the more rounded studies of the “hidden”(Bagehot), informal processes which were encouraged by the seminal 1970s book about the British budget process – The Private government of public money by the outsiders Heclo and Wildavsky.

A “Critical” study or analysis is a more complex term – since the word can mean “carping” to the man in the street or textual deconstruction to an academic. When I use the phrase critical study (as Humpty Dumpty might have said) I mean one which tries not only to describe a system but to assess how well it works (begging the obvious question - For whom?!) Despite the knowledge which academics in political science, sociology or public management can bring to the subject, several major factors seem to conspire to prevent social scientists from making any critical contribution to our understanding of the health of the governance system.

First is the strength of academic specialisation - which has discouraged and continues to discourage the sort of inter-disciplinary approach needed to explore the question of the capacity of a governance system. Then there is the aloofness of the academic tradition which makes it difficult for specialists to engage in critiques which might be seen as too political. Not, however, that this prevented people like Peter Self from lambasting the nonsenses of market thinking in government in the 1980s. And this blog has already mentioned the powerful critique of the effect of commodification on some public services carried out by Colin Leys in Market-driven Politics (2003) and by Alysson Pollok in NHS plc (2004).
Rod Rhodes is a more typical example – a leading public administration academic who invented the phrase “hollowed-out executive” to describe the loss of government functions in the last 30 years - but who chose to keep his critique incestuous both in the language and outlets he used. He played a major role in developing the “network” understanding of government – but then allowed anthropological and phenomenological assumptions to overwhelm him.
The blandishments of consultancy are a potential counter pressure to this tradition – which gets a small minority of academics too engaged with peripheral issues which so excite civil servants and Ministers.

A final factor explaining the lack of academic contribution to the understanding of the nature of our current democratic system is the contempt in which academics who write for (and become popular with) the wider public are held in the academic community - and the damage which is therefore done to one’s academic career if one chooses that path. I remember how the charismatic historian AJP Tayor was treated. And it’s interesting that Zygmunt Baumann began to write his books only after he retired from academia. Major developments in public management have, of course, encouraged academics like Norman Flynn to present and assess them for a wider public. And the same has happened in the field of constitutional theory – eg Anthony King’s The British Constitution (2007). But the first is a bit long on descriptions and the second on historical figures. And both are very partial pictures of the governance system.

This is getting to be a long post – so we need to be clear why it is important to have a systematic, up-to-date and plausible statement about how (well) our governance arrangements (or architecture) work. First as a check (or benchmark) for the myriad iniatives which governments have inflicted at large cost on an increasingly confused public and public servants. This is widely accepted as a major problem – the new Prime Minister, for example, had promised not to inflict any more changes on the health service – and yet, within a few weeks, he was making plans to introduce one of the biggest organisational upheavals ever seen.

But a second, even more powerful reason why a critical study is needed is that the British public no longer feels that it is worth engaging in democratic politics. “They are all the same – promising one thing, doing another – looking after themselves”. In the 1970s some academics helped pave the way for the neo-liberal revolution by demonstrating in addition (in the new field of implementation studies) that the machinery of bureaucracy made it very difficult to implement political decisions; the popular phrase was “the overloaded state”. Margaret Thatcher completed the hollowing out of democracy by her infamous slogan – There is no alternative (TINA)
Consistent with the post-modernist mood,Gerry Stoker places the problem firmly within our own minds -

A propensity to disappoint is an inherent feature of governance even in democratic societies. I think that a substantial part of the discontent with politics is because the discourse and practice of collective decision-making sits very uncomfortably alongside the discourse and practice of individual choice, self-expression and market-based fulfilment of needs and wants. As a result too many citizens fail appreciate these inherent characteristics of the political process in democratic settings.
Making decisions through markets relies on individuals choosing what suits them. The political processes that are essential to steer government struggle to deliver against the lionization of individual choice in our societies. Democracy means that you can be involved in the decision but what the decision is not necessarily your choice yet you are expected to accept the decision. As a form of collective decision-making politics is, even in a democracy, a centralized form of decision-making compared to market-based alternatives.

Mass democracies face a potential crisis because of the scale of discontent surrounding the political process. Discontent comes in two main forms: disengagement from politics and frustrated activism. If the twentieth century saw the establishment of mass democracy the scale of discontent surrounding the political process in these democracies runs the risk of making these systems unsustainable in the twenty first century.

Some Journalists have made an honourable effort over the decades to give the wider public some critical overviews – starting with Anthony Sampson who famously tried to track the operations of the system over 4 decades finishing his last, angriest version only months before his death in 2004. Andrew Marr had a book in the mid 1990s on the failure and future of British democracy. So did Simon Jenkins (Accountable to None – 1996).
But it was a campaigning (rather than mainstream) journalist who produced in 2001 the most revealing and critical study Captive State - the corporate takeover of Britain which gave us the real detail, for example, behind Gordon Brown’s horrendous Private Financial Initiative (PFI) and it is therefore Monbiot’s book which is my first nomination – despite being now 10 years old and concentrating its attention on only part of the picture (the political-business interface). Part of the critique, of course, of our governance arrangements is how the corporate ownership of the media has muzzled the critical journalistic voice – Will Hutton is very eloquent about that in his latest book.

Some politicians, of course, do produce books which advance our understanding of the whole process. I speak not of Tony Blair – and that whole self-justifying political autobiographical genre - but the writings of people such as RHS Crossman (on whose notes on Bagehot I grew up); John McIntosh (who was my tutor); Leo Abse (whose book Private Member was a marvellous psychological study of politicians); David Marquand; and, of course, the monumental diaries of Tony Benn. And New Labour had some honourable people in its ranks – who accepted that their critical or maverick approach denied them office. Chris Mullin was one - and has given us 2 wry reflections of politics and government in action. But, over 50 years, not a single title which deserves the epithet “critical”.

Tony Wright is an academic who for more than a decade operated quietly as Chairman of the prestigious Select Committee on Public Administration and helped produce a raft of critical reports on various aspects of governance operations. How retired from parliament, he has become a Professor (of Politics) and I look to him for some of the missing critique. Pity he can’t get together with George Monbiot to produce an expanded and updated version of the GB book!!
So far I’ve discussed academics, journalists and politicians. But what about the shadowy world of political advisers, Think Tanks and NGOs? As we might expect from such a concentration of putative brainpower, three of my 4 recommendations come from this stable. Political Power and democratic control – the democratic audit of the United Kingdom was commissioned by the Rowntree Trust and produced in 1999 - by Stuart Weir and David Beetham. Weir followed it up in 2009 with a short spoof constitution of the UK. These focus very much on the centralisation of power.

My third nominee for useful study of government capacity is ubiquitous (advisor) Chris Foster’s British Government in Crisis (2005)
which extends the analysis to the administrative aspects which Flynn describes but which (as befits someone who was a senior Price Waterhouse employee) fails to mention the interstices with the business world.

My final nomination is another product of a british Foundation – Rowntree again. Power to the People (2006) was the result of an independent inquiry (which in true british tradition invited evidence and organised dialogues) and can therefore reasonably be seen as a mainstream diagnosis and set of prescriptions. I would fault it only because of its basic assumption that, if the system is made more transparent, representative, decentralised and accountable, everything will be OK

After all this scribbling, then we are left with a central question – is the British problem one of political centralisation? of government overreach? A failure of the political class? Adversarial politics? Civil service incompetence? Corporate takeover? Or, as Stoker argues, misunderstanding? At one or time or another in the past 5 decades each has been proposed as the key problem - and led to frenetic initiatives. Little wonder that I am sympathetic to systems approaches or to constraints on initiatives!

So far, so parochial! A key question I would like some help on is the extent to which this concern is a British/Anglo-saxon phenomenon – or a wider European issue. I will try to say something (much briefer) about this in my next post.

The naked Emperor

I started the morning reading a couple of the “peak oil” blogs – those who not only accept that the sort of lives modern capitalism has created for us is unsustainable but have adopted a minimal and more traditional way of life. The title of the first blog is a bit discouraging - the arch druid report - but the content is very good!
I then wasted an hour trying to get Amazon to bring back the 22 objects in my basket – most of which have vanished (with my wishlist). I could not understand what the first guy was saying – he and his accent were both so thick – and he eventually just left me hanging. The woman who came next was also awful and almost refused to help me because I could not immediately give her the postal code on top of the rest of the address. Her only advice was to contact my server company. I hung up on her – but realise that I should have been more sympathetic. They are treated like shit – so why should they behave otherwise. On the other hand, I have been very impressed with the patience and skills of those on the helpline at Vodaphone here when I needed help!
Then onto The Guardian’s initial coverage of the 250 US Embassy cables given recently to WikiLeaks – of which we will hear a great deal more this week. Simon Jenkins’post seems to me to strike the right note -

Anything said or done in the name of a democracy is, prima facie, of public interest. When that democracy purports to be "world policeman" that interest is global. Nonetheless, the Guardian had to consider two things in abetting disclosure, irrespective of what is anyway published by WikiLeaks. It could not be party to putting the lives of individuals or sources at risk, nor reveal material that might compromise ongoing military operations or the location of special forces.
In this light, two backup checks were applied. The US government was told in advance the areas or themes covered, and "representations" were invited in return. These were considered. Details of "redactions" were then shared with the other four media recipients of the material and sent to WikiLeaks itself, to establish, albeit voluntarily, some common standard.
The state department knew of the leak several months ago and had ample time to alert staff in sensitive locations. Its pre-emptive scaremongering over the weekend stupidly contrived to hint at material not in fact being published. Nor is the material classified top secret, being at a level that more than 3 million US government employees are cleared to see, and available on the defence department's internal Siprnet. Such dissemination of "secrets" might be thought reckless.

The revelations do not have the startling, coldblooded immediacy of the WikiLeaks war logs from Iraq and Afghanistan, with their astonishing insight into the minds of fighting men seemingly detached from the ethics of war. These disclosures are largely of analysis and high-grade gossip. Insofar as they are sensational, it is in showing the corruption and mendacity of those in power, and the mismatch between what they claim and what they do.
Few will be surprised to know that Vladimir Putin runs the world's most sensational kleptocracy, that the Saudis wanted the Americans to bomb Iran, or that Pakistan's ISI is hopelessly involved with Taliban groups of fiendish complexity.

We now know that Washington knows too.
The full extent of American dealings with Yemen might upset that country's government, but is hardly surprising. If it is true that the Pentagon targeted refugee camps for bombing, it should be of general concern. American congressmen might also be interested in the sums of money given to certain foreign generals supposedly to pay for military equipment.
The job of the media is not to protect power from embarrassment. If American spies are breaking United Nations rules by seeking the DNA biometrics of the UN director general, he is entitled to hear of it. British voters should know what Afghan leaders thought of British troops. American (and British) taxpayers might question, too, how most of the billions of dollars going in aid to Afghanistan simply exits the country at Kabul airport.

No harm is done by high-class chatter about President Nicolas Sarkozy's vulgarity and lack of house-training, or about the British royal family. What the American embassy in London thinks about the coalition suggests not an alliance at risk but an embassy with a talent problem.
The money wasting is staggering. Aid payments are never followed, never audited, never evaluated. The impression is of the world's superpower roaming helpless in a world in which nobody behaves as bidden. Iran, Russia, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Yemen, the United Nations, are all perpetually off script. Washington reacts like a wounded bear, its instincts imperial but its power projection unproductive. America's foreign policy is revealed as a slave to rightwing drift, terrified of a bomb exploding abroad or of a pro-Israeli congressman at home.

Note the key sentence - Insofar as they are sensational, it is in showing the corruption and mendacity of those in power, and the mismatch between what they claim and what they do. Which takes us back to the questions which have been worrying me these last few months – (a) the apparently inherent incapacity of our modern “democratic systems”; (b) the implications of this for the so-called discipline of public management; and (c) for the work of instition-building in transition countries.
A google book I encountered on the first theme is The Climate Change Challenge and the failure of democracy (2007)
The sketch is a Mark Behar (BG 1950s) I have hanging in my bathroom!

landscapes

Last month we saw a charming exhibition – “Iarna in Pictura Romaneasca” – some 80 winter landscapes by 20th and 21st century Romanian painters - and were quite taken with several, particularly those of Dan Hatmanu and Cornelia Dedu. I was particularly pleased to see at last some examples of modern realist Romanian painings since they are so hard to see in any of the commercial galleries I stumble across here. It seems so much more difficult to find them than in Sofia. A visit to the Cartelesti bookshop got us the latest issue of the small, free but elusive art mag Anticart which generously reproduced all the paintings. Although its website proved impossible to access, the search did allow me to find another excellent site containing the exhibition albums of many contemporary Romanian painters. I've reproduce the Dedu painting which originally caught my eye - and you can see lots more of this painter (who shares my year of birth!) on that site.

A good review (from a radical stance) of Hutton's book here.

wine and the Commons

I discovered a stunning red wine yesterday – a 2008 Feteasca Regal – available from the barrel at 2 euros a litre in the Tohani wine shop on Una Maia. I don’t normally go there - it looks too posh compared with the places in the Matache market area which I frequent. Tohani is a commune in my favourite wine area here - Dealul Mare - the area east of Ploiesti running to Buzau but I have been diverted from its wines by the great Riesling-Pinot Gris I found recently in the Recas wine shop round the corner from the Dealul Mare one at the Matache market. The Tohani shop was offering a Riesling from the barrel – but lukewarm! However their (Merlot) rose was tasty and will bring me back to the place. I worry at the moment about our future wine supplies – because the Chinese are just beginning to discover European wines. Their wines are actually more like liquors so it will hopefully take some time before their palates adjust. At the moment the wines they buy are top of the range French and are bought as status symbols rather than for enjoyment.
Another discovery was the cultural magazine available online from the Romanian Cultural Foundation – although nothing has appeared in 2010. A 2006 issue focussed on Bucharest – and had quite a few articles bemoaning the destruction of the archiectural legacy.

When you actually look, it’s amazing what is actually available on the theme of alternatives to the monstrous economic path we stumbled down some decades back. And during the night I actually discovered an example of what my previous post had been asking for – someone who has retired and is now using his experience, time and other resources to try to develop a more appropriate system.

I’m a businessman. I believe society should reward successful initiative with profit. At the same time, I know that profit-seeking activities have unhealthy side effects. They cause pollution, waste, inequality, anxiety, and no small amount of confusion about the purpose of life.
I’m also a liberal, in the sense that I’m not averse to a role for government in society. Yet history has convinced me that representative government can’t adequately protect the interests of ordinary citizens. Even less can it protect the interests of future generations, ecosystems, and nonhuman species. The reason is that most—though not all—of the time, government puts the interests of private corporations first. This is a systemic problem of a capitalist democracy, not just a matter of electing new leaders.
If you identify with the preceding sentiments, then you might be confused and demoralized, as I have been lately. If capitalism as we know it is deeply flawed, and government is no savior, where lies hope? This strikes me as one of the great dilemmas of our time. For years the Right has been saying—nay, shouting—that government is flawed and that only privatization, deregulation, and tax cuts can save us. For just as long, the Left has been insisting that markets are flawed and that only government can save us. The trouble is that both sides are half-right and half-wrong. They’re both right that markets and state are flawed, and both wrong that salvation lies in either sphere. But if that’s the case, what are we to do? Is there, perhaps, a missing set of institutions that can help us? I began pondering this dilemma about ten years ago after retiring from Working Assets, a business I cofounded in 1982. (Working Assets offers telephone and credit card services which automatically donate to nonprofit groups working for a better world.) My initial ruminations focused on climate change caused by human emissions of heat-trapping gases. Some analysts saw this as a “tragedy of the commons,” a concept popularized forty years ago by biologist Garrett Hardin. According to Hardin, people will always overuse a commons because it’s in their self-interest to do so. I saw the problem instead as a pair of tragedies: first a tragedy of the market, which has no way of curbing its own excesses, and second a tragedy of government, which fails to protect the atmosphere because polluting corporations are powerful and future generations don’t vote.

old men should be explorers

I mentioned on the Tuesday post that I had written a note ten years ago about making better use of my life. Before I come to that, let me put my life in perspective. In the 1970s and 1980s I got too caught up in political activity – neglecting my academic position and using my political position (which paid 20 euros a working day) to encourage community enterprise. It was what we might call pro bono work – and I entered my 50th year an exile with virtually no money in my bank account. Fortunately my parents’ minimalist way of life had taught me not only how to survive but to celebrate life on a pittance (I require only wines, a good cooker and books!). And the intellectual challenge of post-communist governance (how I hate that term!) reform, new cultures and consultancy fees were more than enough to sustain me (in all senses) over the next 2 decades. For the first time in my life, I was persuaded to put my (hard-earned) cash into investments – and saw them duly climb, fall and climb again. Ultimately I could not accept what lay behind it all – and pulled all my money from this rotten system just before the post-2005 decline and felt very flush. This was just after I had set out (and briefly explored) the following questions in a note -
• why I was pessimistic about the future and so unhappy with the activities of the programmes and organisations with which I dealt – and with what the French have called La Pensee Unique, the post 1989 “Washington consensus”
• who are the organisations and people I admire
• what they are achieving - and what not
• how these gaps can be reduced
• the role of an individual such as me in that

Part of the problem, I feel, is the sheer richness of analyses, writings and organisations – all dealing with part of what is a systemic problem. Those struggling valiantly with local initiatives often don’t have the time or patience to make sense of what they often see as over-shrill or theoretical writings; and those dealing with the large picture can sometimes be impatient with what they perhaps see as the naivety of the practitioner.

Having explored the various questions I then turned to what I should be doing – as an isolated individual.

A noticeable phenomenon is that, when some politicians retire and no longer have the competitive pressures on them, they become more critical about the domestic and global systems they accepted when they were in office. The same is true of many officials. There must be a great potential amongst those who have
• Time (now retired)
• money
• Education (higher than any previous generation) and potential understanding (because of the impact of the NGO critique)
• An interest (satisfaction in making a contribution)
• Conscience (“I’ve taken – now I should give a little back”)
• A greater chance of persuasion by virtue of their patent lack of vested interest – and being late converts
• networks

Surely a significant number of retired officials, academics and consultants in UK and some other countries can be encouraged to come together; learn from one another – and develop ways of communicating and acting to make their concerns about national and global systems more influential?

Ten years on, I pose the question again. What are people such as doing to make a difference - as the world around us implodes?
Moving to more urgent contemporary concerns, Cicero's songs offers a very good take on the European crisis here.

The fundamental problem is the economic structure of most of the European economies. The standard model of these economies has been to pay for today's bills with cheques drawn against the future. Instead of saving up for things today and acquiring them later, we have chosen to acquire them today and pay for them in the future. To a degree, it has worked: the levels of average prosperity in the present day would stagger most of our forefathers. Yet, there has always been a critical piece of small print: growth needed to continue, and not just economic growth, but population growth too, so that the costs were painless enough for the next generation to carry.
Yet about 40 years ago, the oil shocks created inflation that was not the result of economic collapse or war, but for several years was a normal part of business. In the face of this, real assets, especially property, held their value in real terms, but looked like they were appreciating sharply in nominal terms. Property became more and more popular, and banks began to prefer not only lending to property purchasers, but also lending against property to finance other asset purchases. All the time the central banks, trying to "even out" the cycle, provided excess liquidity in the downturn, while failing to tighten sufficiently in the upturn. Since this helped to erode money as a store of value, property began to look like a one-way bet.
At more or less the same time, we lost sight of another basic issue. People began to retire earlier and earlier, believing that the inflated asset-largely property- values that supported this decision were normal. Even as life expectancy increased into the eighties, people began to stop working in their mid fifties. The time a pension had to cover went from a few years to several decades. The cheques we were drawing against the future grew ever larger.
It was not just in the private sector that saving became a dirty word: States too began to hand out increasingly extravagant welfare packages: for millions of people, it was not economic to work. Skills rotted, and both Western Europe and the USA acquired a burden of the unemployable unemployed who nonetheless made a substantial call on the public purse.
It was a long time coming, but the property bubble finally burst. The result was not merely the failure those of banks most directly involved in property, but also those banks exposed to the ABS market- which in practice meant pretty much all of them.
The impact in Europe was twofold. Those countries most exposed to property: the UK, Ireland and Spain saw large parts of their banking system evaporate. Domestic rescue plans were initiated and guarantees were issued. Meanwhile those countries with large state debts based on an unaffordable welfare state found that their access to the capital markets closed. Populations to pay for the welfare are generally falling- and resistance to immigration is making the problem even worse.
At first it was the poorly structured economies that fared worse: Greece was forced to address its long term deficit. However, the absolute breakdown of the Irish property market increased Irish government liabilities to several times the Irish GDP. The deficit yawned to over 30% of GDP.
At this point the anti Euro crew will argue that had the Irish been able to devalue their currency, then the crisis would have been resolved, because the bubble would have burst far sooner if the demand for Punt, as opposed to Euro, assets had reflected the smaller size of the Irish economy alone versus the Eurozone as a whole. Furthermore, the Irish could have mitigated the crisis, as the UK has done, by devaluing their currency.
Mitigated, perhaps, but as the experience of the UK, which can devalue its currency, shows it is certainly not solved. Devaluation is only ever a temporary solution, and if it is used- as it has been in the UK- simply to avoid painful structural adjustment then it ends up permanently reducing the economic potential of the entire economy as people simply build in higher inflationary expectations. Arguably the reason for the instability in the Eurozone's periphery is a function of the fact Germany- the core Euro economy- has been undergoing a long and difficult restructuring, and has emerged extremely competitive, indeed too competitive for the other unrestructured economies to cope with.
Now the breakdown of the property based savings and welfare system is creating a second meltdown: not only a meltdown of the banking system, but also of the states that have issued guarantees to that banking system.
It is a meltdown that will lead to sovereign defaults, and not just in Europe. The policy of competitive devaluation can not work where China- the worlds largest surplus economy and the worlds manufacturing base- maintains its own artificially low currency level. Without the unlikely prospect of a dramatic Chinese revaluation, even the breakup of the Eurozone and drastic devaluation by the most insolvent economies will not solve anything. The Germans will remain efficient, the Chinese will remain efficient and investors will be more fearful than ever about the prospects of the ex-Euro countries.
The only solution is to do what the Baltic states have done: make a drastic cut in costs by an "internal devaluation", in the case of the Baltic by around 25%. That means wages fall by 30% and house prices by 50%, and the overall level of costs by about 15%. The Balts did in last year. The Greeks propose to do half as much over five years, the Irish by 15%- not 25%- over 3 years. Not enough, and the result is that these Euro-delinquents will require a rescue that is beyond the ability of the rest of the Eurozone to finance. A debt default is therefore now very likely. Only this is where we can criticise the ECB and the European Council: we still do not understand how such a default will be handled.
But after the inevitable default happens, we are in a whole new ball game, and no one knows what happens then. One thing is for sure, very few of my generation and none of the following one will be retiring from work at 55.
The age of austerity that looms before us is set to be measured in decades rather than years.