problems of democratic transition and consolidation

Most of the world (with the obvious exception of Chinese rulers) celebrates the achievement of Egyptian „people power” – but how little analysis about the prospects which lie ahead. One of the exceptions is a piece by an Egyptian activist which goes beyond the superficial reporting of the Western media; warns about the military; and gives a rare insight into what workers have been doing. Read the full article (and the good discussion thread) here.

Central and Eastern Europe countries seem to offer the most recent examples of (differential) experiences of the fall of dictatorships. I have referred several times to the Romanian experience which Tom Gallagher has described most clearly in his Theft of a nation – Romania since the fall of communism
Romania is patently the worst of the recent accession countries. It got rid of a dictator - but the same personnel and system persisted for almost a decade. It has a constitutional and electoral system which splits power between a Presidency and 2 parliamentary bodies and makes coherent action extraordinarily difficult for the coalition governments which have become the basic feature of its governments. And the culture of every man for himself makes it almost impossible to work consensually and in the public good. For a good example of the lawlessness which passes for government here in Romania see the post of 12 Feb on this site.

But I don’t think the central European countries offer much useful experience to the Egyptians and Tunisians. For a start they did not have the decades of military rule which Egypt has experienced – indeed the military in most of these countries has been and remains a joke (despite their salaries and pensions). Turkey and the south American dictators of the end of the last century are the better parallel. And, despite being in the EU Neighbourhood programme of technical assistance, neither Egypt or Tunisia have any prospect of European accession – which was the basic incentive for (formal) institutional changes for the central European countries. Almost two decades ago, when I started this latest phase of my life, working in central Europe, I read thirstily the literature which was pouring out then on the mechanics of transition – how countries which had been under dictatorships could make the transition to democracies (see section 3 of this annotated bibliography on my website.
The best was one which drew on the Spanish and south American experience and was produced in 1996 by Juan Linz and Alfred Stepan - Problems of Democratic Transition and Consolidation – S Europe, S America and post-communist Europe. It’s a remarkable and definitive book – which initially establishes the basic classifications to conduct the assessments on the extent to which the transformations are consolidated and then analyses each country and region in considerable detail and profundity. They suggest a four-part classification for non-democratic regimes
• Authoritarian
• Totalitarian
• Post-totalitarian
• sultanistic

A "consolidated" democracy is one which combines behavioural (elite), attitudinal (public) and constitutional elements. Five conditions are suggested –
• Free and lively civil society
• Relatively autonomous and valued political society
• Rule of law to ensure legal guarantees for citizens' freedoms and independent associational life
• Usable state bureaucracy
• Institutionalised economic society

Each of these interacts with the others - and affects the outcome of transition. They also bring in five other important, but less major, variables - (a) the leadership basis of the prior regime, (b) who controls the transition, (c) international influences, (c) political economy of legitimacy and coercion (relationship between citizen perceptions of economic efficacy and of regime legitimacy) and (e) constitution-making environments. This study is the culmination of a lifetime's study of the transformation process; is written elegantly and with very detailed references for follow-up study. A summarising article they wrote at the same time can be found here.
A different type of book from Elster J, Offe C Preuss U was their Institutional Design in Post-Communist Societies - Rebuilding the Ship at Sea (1998) which focussed on Czechia, Slovakia, Hungary and Bulgaria.

Those activists want us to trust Mubarak’s generals with the transition to democracy–the same junta that has provided the backbone of his dictatorship over the past 30 years. And while I believe the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces, who receive $1.3 billion annually from the US, will eventually engineer the transition to a “civilian” government, I have no doubt it will be a government that will guarantee the continuation of a system that will never touch the army’s privileges, keep the armed forces as the institution that will have the final say in politics (like for example Turkey), guarantee Egypt will continue to follow the US foreign policy whether it’s the undesired peace with Apartheid State of Israel, safe passage for the US navy in the Suez Canal, the continuation of the Gaza siege and exports of natural gas to Israel at subsidized rates. The “civilian” government is not about cabinet members who do not wear military uniforms. A civilian government means a government that fully represents the Egyptian people’s demands and desires without any intervention from the brass. And I see this hard to be accomplished or allowed by the junta.
The military has been the ruling institution in this country since 1952. Its leaders are part of the establishment. And while the young officers and soldiers are our allies, we cannot for one second lend our trust and confidence to the generals. Moreover, those army leaders need to be investigated. I want to know more about their involvement in the business sector.

who knows of reforms of kleptocratic regimes?

Three things account for my silence of the last three days – a particularly foul bout of the flu; a powerful novel 1,000 page book The Kindly Ones by Jonathan Littell which recounts, from old age, the activities of a senior 30 year old SS bureaucrat throughout the harrowing years of the war; and my attempt to draft a paper for the May Conference of the Network of Schools of Public Administration in centraland eastern europe (NISPAcee). I’ve got a fair amount of text and have reached the critical stage of drafting a first Executive Summary of the key points I seem to be arguing –

The Schools which form NISPAcee train officials from state administration in both EU member countries and in those which neighbour the EU - but their courses have little or no impact in shaping the perspectives and behaviour of public officials particularly at a senior level where the agenda is set by politics with both a large and small „p”.

More seriously, the content of their teaching is conducted at a high level of rationality – and takes little account of the political context of the work of the public service (particularly appointments and promotion) in CEEC nor of the questionable basis of many of the new models of pubic management they have adopted with such enthusiasm.

The same is true of the intervention tools used by the (large) consultancy industry funded by the EU which fail to account of the highly charged political environment of most CEEC countries – and which therefore make little impact.

The design and delivery of technical assistance of administrative reform is, in any case, fatally split between anonymous individual consultants and EU officials (on the one hand) who design the programmes and Terms of Reference according to unknown assumptions about drivers of change – and the actual consultants who have to manage the projects exactly as designed – regardless of their relevance to the situation they confront on the ground several years later.

As long as accession was the name of the game, this perhaps didn’t matter too much since the „beneficiaries” of Technical Assistance in accession countries had little choice than to comply with external advice.

It is a completely different matter with, for example, Neighbourhood countries – where the language of „local ownership” has to be taken more seriously.

The rhetoric about and programmes for anti-corruption cloak the reality that a systemically corrupt New Class has arisen in many CEEC countries – which makes a mockery of administrative reform and improved public services. The global financial crisis was just the last nail in the coffin.

It is insufficiently recognised that the language of „beneficiaries” and „experts” contradicts utterly the dynamics of a normal client-consultant relationship.

Despite the many evaluations of EU programmes of Technical Assistance which have been carried out, I am not aware of any real (as distinct from formalistic) assessments of the impact of (and lessons from) the large amounts of money spent on the various blocks of work in such fields as functional review, rule of law, civil service reform etc

I know of no examples of the successful transformation of kleptocratic regimes into operational democracies – nor of the possible drivers of such a transformation.

Another heroic example from China – a blind activist released from prison but surrounded in his house day and night by more than 20 state louts is able to smuggle out an eloquent video of his experience which you can see here. He and his wife are beaten senseless for this gesture.
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purple heather

The last post mentioned the book on „wabi sabi” which I’m reading. One of its elements is the appreciation as art objects of ordinary, natural things and of artefacts constructed from nature such as wood, stone and terra cotta. Those brought up on the seaboard of the Atlantic Ocean (as I was) generally come to love the smooth polished pebbles and dramatically carved rocks you find everywhere on the West Coast of Scotland – pounded into shape by the powerful Ocean. I even put one of the photographs I had taken of a rock as an illustration for the front cover of my last book – In Transit – notes on good governance. And one of my most precious collections is a set of Uzbek terra cotta figurines showing various basic occuptations such as a barbour, ceramic maker, beggar etc
I was very pleasantly surprised to find, on my last day in Sofia, pots of purple (unfortunately more red than violet) heather – a well-known Scottish plant which gives our mountains their lovely, special hue in late summer - a plant which is apparently quite rife also in Bulgaria!

com-panion-ship - sharing bread

I can’t leave Sofia without my thanks to my great hosts and friends. But it’s invidious to mention them now since I wouldn’t know who to put first - the Bulgarian alphabetical listings use the first „given” name - not the family name. Just as they shake their head to indicate agreement. Very contrary! Suffice to say that, apart from the company, paintings and laughs, I had (and gave) great food – I haven’t mentioned Jovo’s great artist spread on Sunday afternoon in his studio – salads and pickled vegetables with pastrami and home-made Raki (from muscat grape) then slow-cooked beef with home-made brown bread and the special Brestovitza red wine prepared privately and sold only to friends by one of the vinoculture experts there. Jovo and Yassen are my first artist friends (apart from Bogdan in Ploiesti) and I have learned so much about Bulgarian painting from them. I was reminded, during the meal, of the spirit in which I was given a meal in a converted church in Jersey City by a Monsignor I had met at a Ditchley Park weekend devoted to urban renewal in the mid 1980s. He was the leader of a community cooperative which now owned much of the real estate of this poor neighbourhood - and the meal he and his Board members offered me (before I caught the plane back to the UK after my 6 week's Fellowship in the USA) celebrated the features of "companionship"- literally "breaking bread with (pane -con)".....It seems to share the qualities of "wabi sabi" – the japanese art of impermanence - which I am reading about at the moment in a delightful book by Andrew Juniper. It explains about the tea-drinking ceremony - whcih I have always appreciated since my days in Uzbekistan
Jovo’s studio is in a special apartment on the outskirts (a huge town in its own rights which had sprouted in the last decade) within sight of his flat – and he has a very distinctive style with elongated nudes with heads bowed which have a touch of Matisse. As we were about to leave, a friend and well-known cartoonist (Ilian Savkov) dropped in – and gave me some more names for my list. He draws daily cartoons for the Daily Standard.
I knew I would not have an easy departure on Tuesday morning - since the car wouldn't start on Sunday - despite a bit of exercise I had given it on Satruday. Once again Ivo came to the rescue - helping to push start it and taking me to a friend who had a cable sorted out in a jiff and for only 10 euros. Thanks Ivo!

Back to the serious stuff

I’ve been indulging myself during the past 2 weeks – both in my activities here in Sofia and the blogposts which have followed them. Time to get serious! I reproduced yesterday an example of a great blogpost – from one of the BBC correspondents. It was an extended brainstorm and produced high-level responses – unlike newspaper threads. I have another good example today – from the archdruid report – which raises the issue of systems thinking.
I’ve been trying to get my head around the implications of systems thinking for some time – I flagged the issue up here … and here. I can understand very well the implications for government policy-making – namely that it should have more respect for the natural order (Lovelock’s Gaia thesis is the logical extreme of that); and more reliance on community-level decision-making. Reliance on market mechanisms too - provided, however, that the basic preconditions of a market are present, namely free entry, free flow of information, multiple suppliers and proper costing of external costs. The word „market” is, in our times, has almost religious value – and is attached (by big business) to processes and operations which are utterly oligopolistic and which have nothing to do with the market. It is not so much socialism as big business which is the enemy of the market. I digress….but, methinks, it’s an important digression.
The implications for organisations of the systems approach is something which I have more difficulty with – even although there is a 500 page book which will spell out this for you which you can access at the bottom of the September 3 post.

I have in the next week to tryo to draft a paper which I have been putting off – for the next NISPAcee Conference (for institutes of public admin in east and central europe) which is being held this year in Varna, just down the road from here. I sent them this outline some months back -

I have spent 40 years of my life on various endeavours concerned to make public service systems more responsive to citizens.
The first 20 years was in Scotland – as an academic and political leader in municipal and regional government to which I helped introduce community development principles and practice. But, at the same time, I supported the various efforts at establishing a corporate management capacity – to ensure that the political leaders had some analysis at hand to allow them to deal with the power of the various specialised professions which dominated service delivery in those days. One of the important principles to me then was that of the pincer movement – achieving change from a combination of challenges from above and below.
These were the years when it was possible to believe that politics was an honourable profession and that (local) government could deliver results for its citizens.

My last 20 years has been spent living and working in central europe and central asia as a consultant to national state bodies in their various decentralisation and civil service reform efforts.
This period has coincided with a global enthusiasm for (and, much more recently, a certain reaction against) all things concerned with the private sector. The political system in most countries got too close to that sector – and is now, perhaps fatally, burned.
And the reform effort - which was initially driven by committed individuals - has become sanitised and castrated by technocrats and the project management from which earlier reform efforts might have benefited.
All of which has made it difficult for those working in transition countries to offer the expected models of good practice. Throughout the 40 years, I have tried to follow the relevant literature on improving government – and to share what lessons my own experience seemed to suggest with those interested. For example, at the 2006 NISPAcee Conference, I offered one of the critical papers on Technical Assistance which led to the establishment the following year of the working group on PA Reform. Its most important section was - Those of us who have got involved in these programmes of advising governments in these countries confront a real moral challenge. We are daring to advise these countries construct effective organisations; we are employed by organisations supposed to have the expertise in how to put systems together to ensure that appropriate intervention strategies emerge to deal with the organisational and social problems of these countries; we are supposed to have the knowledge and skills to help develop appropriate knowledge and skills in others! But how many of us can give positive answers to the following 5 questions? -
• Do the organisations which pay us practice what they and we preach on the ground about good organisational principles?
• Does the knowledge and experience we have as individual consultants actually help us identify and implement interventions which fit the context in which we are working?
• Do we have the skills to make that happen?
• What are the bodies which employ consultants doing to explore such questions – and to deal with the deficiencies which I dare to suggest would be revealed?
• Do any of us have a clue about how to turn kleptocratic regimes into systems that recognise the meaning of public service?
At Varna, I would like to take the gloves off – and suggest some unpalatable lessons from the last few decades – for both training institutes and the EC. But, above all, for us as individuals!

The graphic is another Tudor Banus - "sens de la vie"

How technology enrages - a great post on the current unrest

Good old BBC! Paul Mason of BBC had yesterday one of the best posts I have ever read on a blog. It put down some random thoughts he had about the possible causes of the unrest which has broken out in the Meditarranean Arab world. For those wanting to assess the European reactions to the unrest, Gavin Hewitt's BBC blog also had a great overview. And another article (from the Economist stable) draws some useful parallels from the 1989 revolutions in my part of the world.
Knowing how lazy my readers are, I reproduce the Mason post in its entirety below -

We've had revolution in Tunisia, Egypt's Mubarak is teetering; in Yemen, Jordan and Syria suddenly protests have appeared. In Ireland young techno-savvy professionals are agitating for a "Second Republic"; in France the youth from banlieues battled police on the streets to defend the retirement rights of 60-year olds; in Greece striking and rioting have become a national pastime. And in Britain we've had riots and student occupations that changed the political mood.
What's going on? What's the wider social dynamic?
My editors yesterday asked me put some bullet points down for a discussion on the programme that then didn't happen but I am throwing them into the mix here, on the basis of various conversations with academics who study this and also the participants themselves. At the heart of it all are young people, obviously; students; westernised; secularised. They use social media - as the mainstream media has now woken up to - but this obsession with reporting "they use twitter" is missing the point of what they use it for.
In so far as there are common threads to be found in these different situation, here's 20 things I have spotted:

1. At the heart if it all is a new sociological type: the graduate with no future
2. ...with access to social media, such as Facebook, Twitter and eg Yfrog so they can express themselves in a variety of situations ranging from parliamentary democracy to tyrrany.
3. Therefore truth moves faster than lies, and propaganda becomes flammable.
4. They are not prone to traditional and endemic ideologies: Labourism, Islamism, Fianna Fail Catholicism etc... in fact hermetic ideologies of all forms are rejected.
5. Women very numerous as the backbone of movements. After twenty years of modernised labour markets and higher-education access the "archetypal" protest leader, organizer, facilitator, spokesperson now is an educated young woman.
6. Horizontalism has become endemic because technology makes it easy: it kills vertical hierarchies spontaneously, whereas before - and the quintessential experience of the 20th century - was the killing of dissent within movements, the channeling of movements and their bureaucratisaton.
7. Memes: "A meme acts as a unit for carrying cultural ideas symbols or practices, which can be transmitted from one mind to another through writing, speech, gestures, rituals or other imitable phenomena. Supporters of the concept regard memes as cultural analogues to genes, in that they self-replicate, mutate and respond to selective pressures." (Wikipedia) - so what happens is that ideas arise, are very quickly "market tested" and either take off, bubble under, insinuate themselves or if they are deemed no good they disappear. Ideas self-replicate like genes. Prior to the internet this theory (see Richard Dawkins, 1976) seemed an over-statement but you can now clearly trace the evolution of memes.
8. They all seem to know each other: not only is the network more powerful than the hierarchy - but the ad-hoc network has become easier to form. So if you "follow" somebody from the UCL occupation on Twitter, as I have done, you can easily run into a radical blogger from Egypt, or a lecturer in peaceful resistance in California who mainly does work on Burma so then there are the Burmese tweets to follow. During the early 20th century people would ride hanging on the undersides of train carriages across borders just to make links like these.
9. The specifics of economic failure: the rise of mass access to university-level education is a given. Maybe soon even 50% in higher education will be not enough. In most of the world this is being funded by personal indebtedess - so people are making a rational judgement to go into debt so they will be better paid later. However the prospect of ten years of fiscal retrenchment in some countries means they now know they will be poorer than their parents. And the effect has been like throwing a light switch; the prosperity story is replaced with the doom story, even if for individuals reality will be more complex, and not as bad as they expect.
10.This evaporation of a promise is compounded in the more repressive societies and emerging markets because - even where you get rapid economic growth - it cannot absorb the demographic bulge of young people fast enough to deliver rising living standards for enough of them.
11.To amplify: I can't find the quote but one of the historians of the French Revolution of 1789 wrote that it was not the product of poor people but of poor lawyers. You can have political/economic setups that disappoint the poor for generations - but if lawyers, teachers and doctors are sitting in their garrets freezing and starving you get revolution. Now, in their garrets, they have a laptop and broadband connection.
12.The weakness of organised labour means there's a changed relationship between the radicalized middle class, the poor and the organised workforce. The world looks more like 19th century Paris - heavy predomination of the "progressive" intelligentsia, intermixing with the slum-dwellers at numerous social interfaces (cabarets in the 19C, raves now); huge social fear of the excluded poor but also many rags to riches stories celebrated in the media (Fifty Cent etc); meanwhile the solidaristic culture and respectability of organized labour is still there but, as in Egypt, they find themselves a "stage army" to be marched on and off the scene of history.
13.This leads to a loss of fear among the young radicals of any movement: they can pick and choose; there is no confrontation they can't retreat from. They can "have a day off" from protesting, occupying: whereas twith he old working-class based movements, their place in the ranks of battle was determined and they couldn't retreat once things started. You couldn't "have a day off" from the miners' strike if you lived in a pit village.
14.In addition to a day off, you can "mix and match": I have met people who do community organizing one day, and the next are on a flotilla to Gaza; then they pop up working for a think tank on sustainable energy; then they're writing a book about something completely different. I was astonished to find people I had interviewed inside the UCL occupation blogging from Tahrir Square this week.
15. People just know more than they used to. Dictatorships rely not just on the suppression of news but on the suppression of narratives and truth. More or less everything you need to know to make sense of the world is available as freely downloadable content on the internet: and it's not pre-digested for you by your teachers, parents, priests, imams. For example there are huge numbers of facts available to me now about the subjects I studied at university that were not known when I was there in the 1980s. Then whole academic terms would be spent disputing basic facts, or trying to research them. Now that is still true but the plane of reasoning can be more complex because people have an instant reference source for the undisputed premises of arguments. It's as if physics has been replaced by quantum physics, but in every discipline.
16.There is no Cold War, and the War on Terror is not as effective as the Cold War was in solidifying elites against change. Egypt is proving to be a worked example of this: though it is highly likely things will spiral out of control, post Mubarak - as in all the colour revolutons - the dire warnings of the US right that this will lead to Islamism are a "meme" that has not taken off. In fact you could make an interesting study of how the meme starts, blossoms and fades away over the space of 12 days. To be clear: I am not saying they are wrong - only that the fear of an Islamist takeover in Egypt has not been strong enough to swing the US presidency or the media behind Mubarak.
17. It is - with international pressure and some powerful NGOs - possible to bring down a repressive government without having to spend years in the jungle as a guerilla, or years in the urban underground: instead the oppositional youth - both in the west in repressive regimes like Tunisia/Egypt, and above all in China - live in a virtual undergrowth online and through digital comms networks. The internet is not key here - it is for example the things people swap by text message, the music they swap with each other etc: the hidden meanings in graffiti, street art etc which those in authority fail to spot.
18. People have a better understanding of power. The activists have read their Chomsky and their Hardt-Negri, but the ideas therein have become mimetic: young people believe the issues are no longer class and economics but simply power: they are clever to the point of expertise in knowing how to mess up hierarchies and see the various "revolutions" in their own lives as part of an "exodus" from oppression, not - as previous generations did - as a "diversion into the personal". While Foucault could tell Gilles Deleuze: "We had to wait until the nineteenth century before we began to understand the nature of exploitation, and to this day, we have yet to fully comprehend the nature of power",- that's probably changed.
19. As the algebraic sum of all these factors it feels like the protest "meme" that is sweeping the world - if that premise is indeed true - is profoundly less radical on economics than the one that swept the world in the 1910s and 1920s; they don't seek a total overturn: they seek a moderation of excesses. However on politics the common theme is the dissolution of centralized power and the demand for "autonomy" and personal freedom in addition to formal democracy and an end to corrupt, family based power-elites.
20. Technology has - in many ways, from the contraceptive pill to the iPod, the blog and the CCTV camera - expanded the space and power of the individual.
Some complications....

a) all of the above are generalisations: and have to be read as such.

b) are these methods replicable by their opponents? Clearly up to a point they are. So the assumption in the global progressive movement that their values are aligned with that of the networked world may be wrong. Also we have yet to see what happens to all this social networking if a state ever seriously pulls the plug on the technology: switches the mobile network off, censors the internet, cyber-attacks the protesters.

c) China is the laboratory here, where the Internet Police are paid to go online and foment pro-government "memes" to counteract the oppositional ones. The Egyptian leftist blogger Arabawy.org says on his website that : "in a dictatorship, independent journalism by default becomes a form of activism, and the spread of information is essentially an act of agitation." But independent journalism is suppressed in many parts of the world.

d) what happens to this new, fluffy global zeitgeist when it runs up against the old-style hierarchical dictatorship in a death match, where the latter has about 300 Abrams tanks? We may be about to find out.

e) - and this one is troubling for mainstream politics: are we creating a complete disconnect between the values and language of the state and those of the educated young? Egypt is a classic example - if you hear the NDP officials there is a time-warped aspect to their language compared to that of young doctors and lawyers on the Square. But there are also examples in the UK: much of the political discourse - on both sides of the House of Commons - is treated by many young people as a barely intelligible "noise" - and this goes wider than just the protesters.
(For example: I'm finding it common among non-politicos these days that whenever you mention the "Big Society" there's a shrug and a suppressed laugh - yet if you move into the warren of thinktanks around Westminster, it's treated deadly seriously. Dissing the Big Society has quickly become a "meme" that crosses political tribal boundaries under the Coalition, yet most professional politicians are deaf to "memes" as the youth are to the contents of Hansard.)

That's it - as I say, these are just my thoughts on it all and not researched other than through experience: there are probably whole PhD theses about some of this so feel free to hit the comments.
Likewise if you think it is all balderdash, and if you are over 40 you may, vent your analog-era spleen here

In praise of Sofia

One of my readers was shocked that I was contemplating „leaving Romania” – if only for an 18 month project in Serbia or Bulgaria. As long as I have my house in that beautiful stretch of the Carpathians, it will be difficult to leave the country – although it does stretch my patience a lot. And work in neighbouring countries (Turkey is also still a desirable possibility – although not technically a neighbour) is not inconsistent with continued access to Romania. But Sofia and Brussels are, for me, the ideal cities – and Sofia has a special charm.. Yesterday was an example. I decided to head out and buy the large book on the graphic artist I had discovered by accident – Boris Angeloushev (1902-1966). I learn that his evocation of the black and white graphics of the early 20th century German artist Kathe Kollwitz arises from the fact that he was trained in Berlin Art Academy in the early 1920 at precisely the period she was most active in the struggle for socialism there. Since I first discovered her in Berlin in the 1980s I have been a great fan – and recall also the serendipidy of my encounter with the marvellous 80 year-old Tina von Schullenberg in Duisberg (I think) who was being honoured at a special exhibition of her graphics – which included the skecthes she had done in the 1930s of Nottingham miners. She was gracious enough to gift me with a set to give to the Scottish mining community and also a couple of books (with sketches) she wrote about her time with the Nottingham miners and about her life. And what a life! She was the brother of one of the Generals who took part in the failed July 1944 assassination attempt on Hitler.
At a tram stop I come across another of these open stalls and pick up a collection of reproductions of Russian painters - not far away I pick up 5 great Fondazione Amadeus CDs of baroque music - for less than a euro each. No questions!!
Then a meeting with Blago, my young landlord, who is about to acquire a flat he thinks will interest me for my idea of a base here for the next 12 months (if the Serbia project does not come off) – and he is right. The ground floor of a delightful old house within minutes of Vitosha street and all my galleries. The timing fits – since it will be the end of the month before all the paperwork and slight adjustments are needed and that is the point at which I expect to hear the results of the Serbia project. I also look at a flat he will have for sale nearby which is in its original state and which they will restructure togive a living room of 50 sq metres. It would be a good investement. Then off to see what the guy who sold me sketches (on an old magazine and scraps of paper) purporting to be from the pen of the great Ilia Beshkov has to offer. Beshkov (see example above) worked in the first half of the 20th Century. My bearded gallerist/artist Alexander Aleandriev (at Tsar Assen 38) has a tiny space in which there is room for a chair in which you sit while he pulls things (like rabbits out of a hat) that might interest you from plastic bags and piles of papers, magazines, drawings, aquarelles and oils (some his). This time he had prepared for me a superb large 1958 book with Beshkov sketches and cartoons on glorious paper and a 1965 autobiography full also of the sketches. I snapped them up – along with a 1907 catalogue of another cartoonist I had not heard of – Alexander Boshinov - and got a 1941 newspaper with a couple of Beshkov sketches thrown in as a bonus. "Super dumping prices" he says in his only English! We communicate in Russian - and he is indeed a veritable Russian figure with his beard, flow of words and bohemian work environment.
Then off for my appointment with another gallerist – who is also sitting amidst huge piles of unframed paintings some of which he had prepared for me. I sift through a couple of hundred – and emerge with seven paintings (including a Mateev and a dramatic painting by one Ivan Getsov (1910-1991)of a scene from the war of independence) for just over 1,000 euros in total.
I just have time to take them home and change – and it’s off to a very pleasant dinner with Sylvie and Vlad, from whom I rented my flat in Sofia 3 years ago. A simple salad with a very quaffable Pomorie raki starts the meal in her beautifully spacious flat; followed by a superb delicacy she calls Tsarograd aubergine which has pieces of garlic, Bulgarian white cheese and herbs on a grilled opened-out aubergine base. Tsarograd is - as I learned from the early Mario Zhekov paintings - the old name for Istanbul. Vlad is heading out for a night on the tiles - so I get his garlic aubergine too! The piece-de-resistance is, however, the neck pork stuffed/marinated with three types of cheese!! I want a second helping but know when to call time! Thank you Sylvie!

The point of this long diary entry is simply to say that I don’t have such an active social life in other places. That’s why Sofia scores.

labour of love

I made a comment recently about how Sofia could market itself as an art city – and now find myself working on an idea to produce a small book (in English) about „modern” Bulgarian painters which would give the European visitor a sense of what is available in the many municipal and private galleries in the country – but particularly in Sofia. I’ve spent many pleasant hours during this visit with Yassan of the Konos Gallery and his friend who sold me the Emilia Radushava which headed my post of 30 January. Both are painters themselves and - over cheese, bread and wine – have presented me with examples of painters and extended my knowledge of this great painting tradition. I’m defining „modern” to cover the last 100 years – from the superb little 1911 oil by Alexander Mutafov I was offered for 1,000 euros to the younger contemporary painters examples of which can be seen here.
As a result of these chats and my visits to galleries, I now have a list of more than 100 painters – available on my website with some argument about why the book is necessary. I was able to buy in 2008 a nice little booklet which listed all antique dealers in the whole of Bulgaria but later editions are no longer available. The Sofia City Gallery has a few residual copies of a marvellous large book which is a black and white catalogue of all the Bulgarian paintings in their possession – but the little shop which sells it is closed!
This will not pretend to be a comprehensive guide to the painters who have been active in Bulgaria in the past 100 years. Its purpose is rather
• to convey one man’s passion for viewing and collecting Bulgarian painters of this period
• to encourage visitors to Bulgaria to visit both the private and municipal art galleries - and
• to make their own discoveries.

A printer did a tentative costing yesterday – and was able to tell me I could have 500 copies of a very attractive 100 page book for about 3,000 euros – about a quarter I suspect of what it would cost in the UK. I went looking yesterday for what Yassen told me was the best overview (in Bulgarian) of the period (by Dimitar Avramov). My inquiries at the large second-hand bookshop in the underground passage in front of the University threw up only a large 1982 book purporting to be about modern Bulgarian painting – which , however, had no Mario Zhekovs and only 2 Nikola Tanevs. A revealing historical remnant of socialist selectivity! But not, for me, worth the 100 euros they were asking. Neither the bookshop next door nor the cubicle on the left as you enter the School of Fine Arts could offer me a general book on the period although the shop had a great book with what seemed to be the entire works of Boris Anzelyushev – a graphic artist who lived between 1902 and 1966 and seemed influenced by Kathe Kollwitz. The Fine Arts shop had nice booklets on specific artists I didn’t know – such as Marko Monev from Russe.
And, while we’re on the subject of marketing cities, there is an interesting essay on this subject in the current issue of Eurozine.
The painting is one of my Denjo Chokanoffs