We, the people?

I almost threw a book at the television screen at the start of Trump’s inaugural address last month when he said that this “is the day power transfers..... to you, the people”. How could that be? He didn’t talk during the campaign about strengthening democracy; and, in any event, any serious programme would involve things like citizen juries, participatory budgets etc and would take time to implement properly….

On Inauguration Day power passed only to...... Trump – and we are therefore left with the clear conclusion that he confuses “the people” with himself – as did a certain French monarch when he was famously reported as saying “L’Etat, c’est moi!!” 

Or was it perhaps more of a promise that the “real” America he addresses (and assured in that same speech “never to let down”) could be confident that theirs were the only voices/votes he would bother about?? The rest – particularly journalists, judges, civil servants, politicians, experts, academics, protestors – he would simply ignore and bypass. One article this week put it thus - 

Trump’s inaugural address carried the stamp of hot ambition even in its (opening) salutation: ‘Chief Justice Roberts, President Carter, President Clinton, President Bush, President Obama, fellow Americans and people of the world, thank you.’
What were the people of the world doing here? It has been conjectured that Trump was greeting a blood-brotherhood ..that encompassed the followers of Farage, Le Pen, Orban, Wilders and others. Just as likely, given the grandiosity of the man, he meant to suggest that the fate of the world was so implicated in his ascension that it was only polite to say hello.

 The next section, however, seemed to see the American people as deciders for the world: ‘We, the citizens of America, are now joined in a great national effort to rebuild our country and restore its promise for all of our people. Together, we will determine the course of America and the world for many, many years to come.’ This was immediately followed by an attempt to divide friend from enemy within the US.

 “Against me, the establishment (‘Washington’); with me, the people – or rather the people who matter. In the new era of globalisation, ‘politicians prospered but the jobs left and the factories closed. The establishment protected itself, but not the citizens of our country. Their victories have not been your victories. Their triumphs have not been your triumphs.’ For the people, for once, this inauguration day would be a day of celebration, and Trump would rejoice with them: ‘January 20th 2017 will be remembered as the day the people became the rulers of this nation again. The forgotten men and women of our country will be forgotten no longer.’

 “People power” a la Suisse is all very well – if a bit tiring. But the Swiss have an active citizenry - who can afford to give their time to debate and referenda. Letting a “demagogic kleptocrat” loose who has declared war on those who occupy “the public space” which is the crucial link between the people and rulers.... is something else.....

I have never been a fan of the word “populism”.– on the grounds that it is clearly a derogatory term which is used to cut off discussion…..In a post before the Trump victory I offered some of the elements which I think might reasonably be attributed to the term. Jan Werner-Mueller’s recent little What is Populism? is one of the few books which have so far been written about it and builds on this earlier pamphlet.

But this short video (from last summer) manages to punch home the key elements and, in so doing, to persuade me that almost all the conditions are now in place in the USA for a significant breach in the democratic process…..See also Umbert Eco's classic 1995 article on "Ur-fascism" which identifies 14 elements of the condition......

And the LRB article I quoted from above then goes on to spell out very dramatically how the much-vaunted Obama legacy could so easily be used to muzzle dissidence and protest - 

The national security state that Obama inherited and broadened, and has now passed on to Trump, is so thoroughly protected by secrecy that on most occasions concealment will be an available alternative to lying. Components of the Obama legacy that Trump will draw on include
- the curtailment of the habeas corpus rights of prisoners in the War on Terror;
- the creation of a legal category of permanent detainees who are judged at once impossible to put on trial and too dangerous to release;
- the expanded use of the state secrets privilege to deny legal process to abused prisoners;
the denial of legal standing to American citizens who contest warrantless searches and seizures;
- the allocation of billions of dollars by the Department of Homeland Security to supply state and local police with helicopters, heavy artillery, state-of-the-art surveillance equipment and armoured vehicles; precedent for the violent overthrow of a sovereign government without consultation and approval by Congress (as in Libya);- precedent for the subsidy, training and provision of arms to foreign rebel forces to procure the overthrow of a sovereign government without consultation and approval by Congress (as in Syria);
- the prosecution of domestic whistleblowers as enemy agents under the Foreign Espionage Act of 1917;
- the use of executive authority to order the assassination of persons – including US citizens – who by secret process have been determined to pose an imminent threat to American interests at home or abroad;
- the executive approval given to a nuclear modernisation programme, at an estimated cost of $1 trillion, to streamline, adapt and miniaturise nuclear weapons for up to date practical use;
- the increased availability – when requested of the NSA by any of the other 16 US intelligence agencies – of private internet and phone data on foreign persons or US citizens under suspicion.
 The last of these is the latest iteration of Executive Order 12333, originally issued by Ronald Reagan in 1981. It had made its way through the Obama administration over many deliberate months, and was announced only on 12 January. As with the nuclear modernisation programme in the realm of foreign policy, Executive Order 12333 will have an impact on the experience of civil society which Americans have hardly begun to contemplate. Obama’s awareness of this frightening legacy accounts for the unpredictable urgency with which he campaigned for Hillary Clinton – an almost unseemly display of partisan energy by a sitting president. All along, he was expecting a chosen successor to ‘dial back’ the security state Cheney and Bush had created and he himself normalised.

The Great Disruption?

We have seen such massive changes in our lifetime that I find it odd that key people in Brexit and Trump’s victory talk of the need for “Leninist and Maoist approaches” to help “destroy all of today’s establishment” - 

“Lenin,” Stephen Bannon is quoted as saying “wanted to destroy the state, and that’s my goal too. I want to bring everything crashing down, and destroy all of today’s establishment.” Bannon was employing Lenin’s strategy for Tea Party populist goals. He included in that group the Republican and Democratic Parties, as well as the traditional conservative press.

The Great Disruption (2014) was an entertaining examination of the scale of recent technical change – and its social and political impact. Many would say that 1789 marks the start of Europe and the modern age’s relentless focus on challenging tradition with reason; others trace it further back – to the Scottish Enlightenment of a few decades earlier; the industrial revolution of the same period; or to the Protestant Reformation two centuries earlier (Martin Luther’s 95 theses were nailed to Wittenburg’s church door all of 500 years ago this October!!)

And yet each passing generation seems to feel that it is being hit afresh with change. The different words – “revolution”, “modernisation”, “reform”, “change”, “reinvention”, “innovation”, “disruption” – reflect the confusion as events have played out in the post-war period.

The Turbo-Capitalism we have seen in recent decades may have undermined people’s confidence in government capacity and integrity; and in routine and formal political activity - but technology and the social media have given people an outlet for expressing their anger and grievances……

Brexit and Trump’s victory seem to show that it’s possible to “take back control”….…..suddenly there seems an opportunity to stop the previously irresistible onward charge of globalisation. But how real is this? Human agency may be back in fashion again after the apparent fatalism of Margaret Thatcher’s TINA doctrine (“There is No Alternative”)

But is this all sleight of hand? We are used to being told by the change managers about the need for thorough preparation for significant change, for implementation strategies…….  But noone had given any thought to the possibility of Brexit winning or prepared any strategies; and the first 3 weeks of Trump rule has consisted of only bluster and ill-considered executive orders    

“Change” is a word that has had me salivating for half a century. According to poet Philip Larkin, “Sexual intercourse began in 1963…” – at roughly the same time my generation began to chafe under the restrictions of “tradition” - so well described in David Kynaston’s Austerity Britain and Modernity Britain 1957-1962.

The notion of “modernization” (as set out in a famous series of “What’s wrong with Britain” books published by the Penguin Press in the 60s) became highly seductive for some of us - …. Coincidentally 1963 was the year Harold Wilson delivered his famous speech about the “white heat of technology” to an electrified Labour Party Conference, presaging one of the key themes of the 1964-70 Labour Government.

The need for reform of our institutions (and the power structures they sustained) became a dominant post-war theme and I eagerly absorbed the writing which was coming from American progressive academics in the 1960s (such as Warren Bennis and Amitai Etzioni) about the new possibilities offered by the social sciences; and listened spellbound on the family radio to the 1970 Reith Lectures on “Change and Industrial Society” by Donald Schon – subsequently issued as the book “Beyond the Stable State”. In it, he coined the phrase “Dynamic conservatism” and went on to talk about government as a learning system and to ask what can we know about social change.

From that moment I was hooked on the importance of organisations (particularly public) and of institutional reform……

In those days there was little talk of management (!) and only a few Peter Drucker books…..Toffler’s Future Shock came the very next year (1971) by which time I had started to proselytize the “need for change” in papers which bore such titles as “Radical Reform of municipal management” and “From corporate planning to community action”…..One of these early papers picked up on the theme of “post-bureaucracy” and anticipated that future systems of (public) management would look very different from those previously known…..

It was a decade later (1982), however, when Tom Peters first burst on the scene with his celebration of entrepreneurial management “In pursuit of Excellence” - presaging the demise of large corporations such as IBM and General Motors….

It was to take another decade for this to be reflected in the Clinton/Gore Government Reinvention agenda and 1997 for the start of the British Modernising Government agenda….  All this coinciding with the dot.com revolution……

These days, what I would call Kerensky liberals suddenly - since Brexit and Trump’s victory – are feeling a bit outflanked by a motley crowd of Bolsheviks, Leninists and Maoists….and are trying to understand the revolutionary doctrine being preached by the likes of Trump’s key adviser - Stephen Bannon – who talks of “tearing down” institutions. Der Spiegel makes a good attempt here - 

In November, the news website BuzzFeed published a 50-minute audio clip of remarks made by Bannon via Skype in 2014 that provides a strong glimpse into his world view. They were made at a conference at the Vatican of representatives of the religious right in Europe.

Exactly 100 years ago tomorrow, Bannon began, the assassination in Sarajevo of Archduke Franz Ferdinand sparked World War I. Until that day, there had been "total peace. There was trade, there was globalization, there was technological transfer … Seven weeks later, I think there were 5 million men in uniform and within 30 days there were over a million casualties."

 He went on to say that the world is once again at such a point, "at the very beginning stages of a very brutal and bloody conflict." He blamed it on "a crisis both of our church, a crisis of our faith, a crisis of the West, a crisis of capitalism."Bannon described, first, a system of "crony capitalism" of the elite that only created wealth for the establishment, allowing that he knew what he was talking about from his own background. He said there's a desperate need for a renaissance of "what I call the 'enlightened capitalism' of the Judeo-Christian West," with companies that create jobs and prosperity for all. (although he has also said that the more hard-nosed it is the better!!) 

The second threat, he said, comes from the secularization of society. He noted that the "overwhelming drive of popular culture is to absolutely secularize" millennials under 30. He said Breitbart had become the voice of the anti-abortion movement and the traditional marriage movement.

The third threat, and perhaps the greatest, Bannon preached from the computer screen, is Islam. "We are in an outright war against jihadist Islamic fascism." But this war, he warned, is "metastasizing far quicker than governments can handle it." He said a "populist revolt" of "working men and women" is now needed to battle Wall Street and Islam at the same time, an international Tea Party movement modelled after Britain's right-wing populist UKIP, which he knows well. The U.S. Republican Party establishment, on the other hand, he described as a "collection of crony capitalists."

An international alliance of populists united in their hatred of the elite, appealing to the workers and brought together by a common enemy -- only with the Muslims replacing the Jews this time. It all makes Bannon, and Trump along with him, sound like a fascist.

But are they? Times are different today, as are the means, paths and goals. There's no longer a need for masses of brown shirts or a screaming Goebbels. The masses are on the internet today and they read Breitbart and follow Trump on Twitter. The manifestations today are modern and the ideology has also been modernized. But the attitudes themselves seem to be enjoying a renaissance.

In future posts I want to explore these issues more deeply

update; regrettably, I had not appreciated that in 1999 Francis Fukuyama no less had produced a book with the same title -  The Great Disruption – human nature and the reconstitution of social order which had tracked the breakdown since 1965!

The painting is one of the few I always remember ........which got away (damn!!!!) It's the amazing Bulgarian,Tony Todorov, who also painted the one heading the previous post....

The Rise and Fall......

A lot of claims have been made in recent weeks for writers who anticipated Trump’s rise to power. First it was Richard Rorty – in a long-forgotten book published in 1998. Then the son of Neil Postman, who had written in 1985 a powerful critique of the effect of modern television - Amusing Ourselves to Death – popped up to claim that his dad had seen it all coming. The son’s article referred us back to Brave New World – issued in 1935….

But the boldest (and perhaps most credible) claim was made last week by one of my favourite bloggers (John Michael Greer) for an amazing book written a century ago by Oswald Spengler – Decline of the West 

The conventional wisdom of our era insists that modern industrial society can’t possibly undergo the same life cycle of rise and fall as every other civilization in history; no, no, there’s got to be some unique future awaiting us—uniquely splendid or uniquely horrible, it doesn’t even seem to matter that much, so long as it’s unique.

The theory, first proposed in the early 18th century by the Italian historian Giambattista Vico and later refined and developed by such scholars as Oswald Spengler and Arnold Toynbee, that civilizations rise and fall in a predictable life cycle, regardless of scale or technological level. That theory’s not just a vague generalization, either; each of the major writers on the subject set out specific stages that appear in order, showed that these have occurred in all past civilizations, and made detailed, falsifiable predictions about how those stages can be expected to occur in our civilization.

Have those panned out? So far, a good deal more often than not. In the final chapters of his second volume, for example, Spengler noted that civilizations in the stage ours was about to reach always end up racked by conflicts that pit established hierarchies against upstart demagogues who rally the disaffected and transform them into a power base. Looking at the trends visible in his own time, he sketched out the most likely form those conflicts would take in the Winter phase of our civilization…..

 Those left out in the cold by these transformations, in turn, end up backing what Spengler called Caesarism—the rise of charismatic demagogues who challenge and eventually overturn the corporate-bureaucratic order.These demagogues needn’t come from within the excluded classes, by the way. Julius Caesar, the obvious example, came from an old upper-class Roman family and parlayed his family connections into a successful political career.

Watchers of the current political scene may be interested to know that Caesar during his lifetime wasn’t the imposing figure he became in retrospect; he had a high shrill voice, his morals were remarkably flexible even by Roman standards—the scurrilous gossip of his time called him “every man’s wife and every woman’s husband”—and he spent much of his career piling up huge debts and then wriggling out from under them. Yet he became the political standardbearer for the plebeian classes, and his assassination by a conspiracy of rich Senators launched the era of civil wars that ended the rule of the old elite once and for all.

Arguments about “rise and fall” have never gone down all that well with opinion-makers who tend to have a vested interest in “progress” and Greer’s long post gives a detailed rebuttal of the sort of logic used by those who would counter the argument of “declinists” 

Thus those people watching the political scene last year who knew their way around Spengler, and noticed that a rich guy had suddenly broken with the corporate-bureaucratic consensus and called for changes that would benefit the excluded classes at the expense of the affluent, wouldn’t have had to wonder what was happening, or what the likely outcome would be.

 It was those who insisted on linear models of history—for example, the claim that the recent ascendancy of modern liberalism counted as the onward march of progress, and therefore was by definition irreversible—who found themselves flailing wildly as history took a turn they considered unthinkable…… And, as Spengler sketches out the process, it also represents the exhaustion of ideology and its replacement by personality. 

A good sustained analysis of Decline of the West which appeared in 1983 argued that Spengler

….. knew that men are generally disdainful of experience and that, driven by limitless and uncontrolled hope, they like to conceptualize the future in terms of what they consider the desirable rather than the likely course of events.
In counterpoint to these, in his view, irrational trends, he remarked that optimism is naive and in some respects even vulgar, and that it surely stands for cowardice when one is afraid to face the fact that life is fleeting and transient in all its aspects.

You can dip for yourself into the 1000 plus pages of the original 1918 book here

The painting is one of my favourite Bulgarian artists - Tony Todoroff

The Revenge of History?

We have become fat, lazy and careless…..taking the levels of financial and institutional security enjoyed from the 1950s through to the 1990s too much for granted ("we" being the citizens of the core European states and the US) 

And whatever lessons the post-war generation learned about the killing fields of Europe in the first half of the 20^th century have clearly not been properly absorbed by their descendants….Nuclear war was a real and evident threat until the late 70s and seemed to have disappeared with the demise of the Soviet Union.

For many, therefore, the last 6 months have been a rude awakening - as the final vestiges of public trust in (government) leadership came crashing down and we found our attention being directed to the last time we confronted such uncertainty - the 1930s. But at last a sense of history is beginning to develop again. A couple of articles crystallised this for me – first one by Tobias Stone which actually appeared last summer - 

During the Centenary of the Battle of the Somme I was struck that it was a direct outcome of the assassination of an Austrian Arch Duke in Bosnia. I very much doubt anyone at the time thought the killing of a minor European royal would lead to the death of 17 million people.My point is that this is a cycle. It happens again and again, but as most people only have a 50-100 year historical perspective (from parents and school) they don’t see that it’s happening again.

As the events that led to the First World War unfolded, there were a few brilliant minds who started to warn that something big was wrong, that the web of treaties across Europe could lead to a war, but they were dismissed as hysterical, mad, or fools, as is always the way, and as people who worry about Putin, Brexit and Trump are dismissed now.

The other article Why Elites always Rule took me back to my university days in the early 1960s when I first encountered (and was impressed by) the work of the elite theorists Robert Michels, Mosca and Pareto; and of other central Europeans such as Schumpeter (of “circulation of the elites” fame) who had been writing a few decades earlier – on the central issue of how the masses might be controlled in an age of democracy……

I also remember Elias Canetti’s Crowds and Power making a big impact on me when its English translation was published in 1962.

By the 1960s, however, far from fearing the masses a lot of us in Europe and America were celebrating them – whether through the fashion for “participation” let alone community action, direct action or community development    

Major political and economic events in the 1970s punctured that optimism and ushered in a celebration not of mutuality but of egocentricity, greed and commodification. Adam Curtis’ The Century of the Self captures the process superbly…….

(each section in the 2 tables represents a decade - starting with the 1930s - with what I take to have been the key themes eg "deindustrialisation" is the first of the themes of the 1980s...)  

I don’t like conspiracy theories but it does seem fairly clear now that a lot of very big money started in the late 1940s to fund a large number of new think-tanks devoted to pushing this new neo-liberal agenda. I remember when I first encountered in the 1970s the pamphlets from the British Institute for Economic Affairs. Their ideas (such as road pricing) were presented with quite ruthless elegance and were quite shocking - but had a coherent logic which allowed me to present them to my surveyor students as examples of the usefulness of economic thinking and principles…

Philip Morkowski’s 2009 study The Road from Mont Pelerin details (in its 480 pages!) how exactly the think tanks managed to achieve this ideological turnaround and to capture most powerful international bodies such as The World Bank, The International Monetary Fund, OECD and the EC. 

The Financial crash of 2008 should have been the catalyst to a rethink but, despite the valiant efforts of people such as Joseph Stiglitz and Mark Blyth, it has taken Brexit and Trump to challenge the assumptions of the neo-liberal machine……  

I don’t think it helps to throw labels around – whether "populist", "racist" or "fascist". (I try not to use any word which ends in “ist” since objecting a few years ago to being called a leftist)

Populist parties started to worry some people around the year 2000 – as you will see from this academic article but intellectual, political and business elites were so trapped in their bubbles that they didn’t spot it coming. Jan Werner-Mueller’s recent little What is Populism? is one of the few books which have so far been written about it and builds on this earlier pamphlet

We do not necessarily have to accept that "what goes around, comes around" ie that history is cyclical. But I suspect that it is a more fruitful approach than the one which has been prevailing in recent decades - namely that it's linear and takes us through innovative change to a better world......

I was impressed that some academics have tried to remedy our myopia and have put together a Trump Syllabus with a fairly extensive reading list -

http://www.chronicle.com/article/Trump-Syllabus/236824

http://www.publicbooks.org/trump-syllabus-2-0/

http://www.publicbooks.org/trump-syllabus-3-0/

In that same spirit I offer these hyperlinks -

Key reading

How to Build an Autocracy

Age of Kakistocracy,

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/1995/06/22/ur-fascism/

https://gerryco23.wordpress.com/2017/01/25/drifting-towards-great-catastrophes-premonitions-from-the-1930s/

Others

https://almostrational.wordpress.com/2015/12/08/read-canetti-stop-trump/

http://www.newstatesman.com/ideas/2011/08/crowds-power-canetti-book-eyes

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2016/11/14/1598974/-Listen-to-Trump-voters-Listen-to-Gessen-Eco-and-Canetti-first-learning-the-lessons-of-history

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2017/01/31/populistauthoritarian_strains_worry_koch_network_132949.html

http://washingtonmonthly.com/2017/01/31/the-12-early-warning-signs-of-fascism/

https://www.onfocus.com/2016/11/6845/anti-authoritarian-immune-system

https://www.opendemocracy.net/robert-borosage/trumps-perverse-populism

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Revolt_of_the_Masses

http://pinkmonkey.com/dl/library1/revolt.pdf

https://freedomhouse.org/report/freedom-world/freedom-world-2017

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2016/04/america-tyranny-donald-trump.html

The title of this post I now see is one quite frequently used - eg 2 contemporary books by leftists (Seamus Milne and Alex Callicos) and also of this useful article    

A Divided country - dangerous prospects

Public protest in Romania has won yet another famous victory – forcing the newly-elected PSD government to cancel the emergency decree it had signed (one midnight earlier last week!!).

A decree (rather than a bill which would have been subject to parliamentary and public discussion) to release many imprisoned for corrupt practices - and to stop the prosecution of hundreds of others (including the leader of the PSD).

More than 100,000 people protested outside central government (just 5 minutes walk from our flat) for several days – just as they had 15 months earlier when a series of scandals eventually forced a previous PDS government to resign. On that occasion, the President appointed a non-political figure as Prime Minister whose government was a mix of technocratic and minor political figures.

The lack of scandals and the ongoing work of the anti-corruption agency (DNA) perhaps made people imagine that “rule of law” had eventually arrived in the country. But, amazingly, the PSD party (inheriting its corrupt Ceaucescu traditions) came back, in the parliamentary elections last December, to a landslide victory – if on a turnout which was less than 40% of the electorate. And immediately declared that it would be taking action to release from prison those convicted and those facing criminal prosecution for corrupt actions of less than some 40,000 euros (its government programme was 173 pages long and I;m still trying to find how that bit was phrased)

Bad enough that this was the first thing they announced – even worse that they made it the subject of an immediate emergency decree with the clear intention of avoiding any public let alone parliamentary discussion. Such is the action of totalitarians - treating the public with contempt. Hardly surprising that people resent being treated in this way….
here's an interesting video discussion from Al Jazeera which contains a good take from someone who had been an adviser to a recent PSD Prime Minister. One of his important points is that the old guard was long cleared out of the PSD and that the current issue is simply that of a fight for survival of the younger political class which has received a thoroughly western education - but which now feels under threat from an over-zealous anti-corruption drive. This goes back to the point I made in an earlier post about the American training of this younger generation which I witnessed for myself in the early 90s as the proponents of the Washington Consensus descended on the country.....

It’s clear that the country is split in two on this issue - with very few neutrals. The issues I referred to in the 2 previous posts have unleashed powerful emotions about the very fabric of the nation - with the revanchist rhetoric of Orban in Hungary and Putin’s minions in Moldova and Bessarabia (added to Trump’s ambivalence about NATO) striking fear into many Romanians. It is significant that the government statement about the withdrawal of the Decree recognised the danger of such public divisions.

Political legitimacy is now being denied by each side – that is what makes this such a dangerous issue. Romania’s President Klaus Johannis is hardly a conciliatory figure, making no secret of his determination to bring down the PDS but with his own legitimacy still in question – he was, after all, almost the only one of some 200 mayors being targeted in 2012/13 for corrupt practices whose case was suspended and then forgotten! And the intellectuals (of which Romania has so many!!) have been all too quick to take sides......leaving a dearth in the space for a more honourable scepticism.....

Much of Romania may be celebrating today – but some cool heads are needed. Talk of bringing down the government so soon after its landslide victory is foolhardy. Already there is talk of the country being "ungovernable".
Cooler heads and minds should rather be focused on holding this government to account for the implementation of those parts of its programme which are not divisive and can help unite the country


Updatel This is the best short piece I;ve read so far about the situation 

And Romania Rising seems a good resource....Bucharest Life  is a bit too ex-pat ("the yokels are revolting") but will give you a sense of what's going on.....

The reproductions are from Bucharest's (first ever) post 1989 exhibition of Romanian Socialist Realism - Art for the people 1948-1965 ? – which will run through to the spring….….A nicely-presented Catalogue (of 300 pages) accompanies the exhibition and is, for the first time for the Gallery, bilingual and well-priced (13 euros). These are more than 70 of the reproductions from my flickr album 

Impervious power

For more than a decade I lived and worked in states in central Asia and central Europe which were (and remain) systemically corrupt – my work being in “small islands” of institutional improvement which had been negotiated as part of a much wider international reform effort. 

“In Transit- notes on good governance” was the little book I used as a calling card in Uzbekistan (3 years); Azerbaijan (2 years); Kyrgyzstan (2 years), Bulgaria (2 years) and, more briefly, Romania (whose project management I could take for less than a month), 

I devoured the literature first on “transitology” (early reading was captured in the 2^nd chapter of "In Transit") and then on “anti-corruption”….and tried, in various papers, to make sense of my experience .

In 2007 I brought my critical thoughts together in a paper Missionaries or mercenaries? presented to the Annual Conference of Network of schools of public admin in central and eastern Europe which I updated in 2011 as a result of an important policy paper about the European Commission’s programme of Technical Assistance  which tried to address the criticism.

That second paper was called The Long Game – not the log-frame – and, in it, I coined the phrase “the impervious state” because of the ease with which, for various reasons, systemically corrupt political regimes have been able to deflect criticism (both domestic and from international bodies) like water slipping down a duck’s back. Sadly, the phrase didn’t stick but states continue to be (ever more) impervious to public discontent.

And, equally sadly, Romania is a prime example of both this systemic corruption and apparent public indifference. There were no celebrations at the beginning of the month – when the country might have been expected to be celebrating what was, after all, the tenth anniversary of its membership of the European Union and when indeed it was celebrating the 27^th year of freedom from the iron grip of Ceaucescu.

Privatisation was a policy insisted on by global institutions after 1989 but was favoured by apparatniks and leaders of many political parties in the region as a means of enriching themselves.

State bodies were left alone - as the fiefdom of these parties - with “reform” efforts consisting basically of new acronyms and rhetoric. 
Lack of any serious reform efforts meant that Romania had no chance of being allowed into Europe in 2004. Although its membership was approved in principle in 2005, a system of annual monitoring and verification reports was installed from 2005 - and is actually still in place for judicial reform. Indeed its eventual membership was allowed 3 years later largely because of the reform efforts of the Minister of Justice Monica Macovei - appointed in 2004 by newly-elected President Traian Basescu. 

It was however typical that the very day after Romania entered the EU (and therefore escaped most of its “conditionalities” ), the Romanian Senate voted for Macovei’s resignation which duly came the following month…..  – just one of so many attacks over the years by politicians and the media on attempts to sustain an independent judiciary

The Anti-Corruption Agency (created in 2003) has managed to hang on….although it is clear that many of the subsequent convictions have been on the basis of tenuous evidence…..public support remains high (judging perhaps it better to have a few“Al Capone” type convictions than let the systemically-corrupt walk free)….

 

It is remarkable how few Europeans know (let alone care) about Romania. Tom Gallagher is an academic who published his Theft of a Nation – Romania since Communism in 2005; Romania and the European Union - how the Weak vanquished the Strong (2010); and has written over the years frequent columns for the European and Romanian press. His interests, however, are much wider which means that the occasional article by outsiders who know little of Romania (such as these by Dennis McShane and David Clark) can so easily (and shamelessly) mislead.

Gallagher must have French and German equivalents but I don’t know of them…. 

Alina Mungiu-Pippidi is a highly respected academic indeed one of the world’s foremost writers on anti-corruption efforts (now based in Berlin) but her efforts to help her country are attacked by the local corporate media….since she is seen as parti-pris…..Here is a typical piece she wrote about her country’s successful efforts in outsmarting the EU.

Can outsiders ever understand what's going on in Romania?

An article and paper from a British consultant/hired gun about aspects of Romania’s judicial system has coincided with an explosive scandal here in Romania about tapes of conversations between anti-corruption agents, Prosecutors and the Secret Service apparently targeting for prosecution people, for example, who were getting under the skin of the previous President……

It got me reflecting for the first time for some years on what Francis Fukuyama called the “Getting to Denmark?” question – namely how long it takes a society to develop strong and reliable institutions of liberal democracy….. This will be a rather personal and disjointed post as I try to collect my thoughts...so forgive me.....I will try shortly to gather them more coherently...

My relationship with Romania goes back exactly 26 years – I arrived to heavy snow and dim lights in January 1991 and, for a week, was ferried to places such as Brasov and Alba Iulia in an ambulance (I was on a WHO assignment) to meet various dignitaries; subsequently travelling to and from Iasi in the East by train. 

In mid 1992 I took up a year’s assignment in the Prime Minister’s Office, working with the newly-elected big city mayors and the Ministry of the Interior to design the country’s first EC project of support for local government – during when I had discussions with several very senior politicians and officials and had a vague sense then of the iron fists and years of experience concealed in their gloves, eyes and voices.…

I was even one of a small number of foreign guests given seats of honour and a special mention at one of the first Conferences then of the renamed Social Democratic party (PSD) - which was all too quickly admitted to the Socialist International…This proved to be a useful network for some very skilful operators to use to pull the wool over Europe’s eyes about the dismal reality of reform efforts in the country in the 90s.

I remember vividly Ralf Dahrendorf’s judgement in 1991 that it would take at least a generation to make the beginnings of an impact on the communist mindset inculcated in central european countries for 50 years. But the European Commission knew differently and made a decision in 1997 which shocked me to the core – that EC technical assistance to central European and Balkan countries would no longer be governed by “developmental” objectives but rather by their ability to meet the formal legal requirement of the Acquis Commaunitaire (AC)…….ie of EU membership

It was obvious that the old power structures were still firmly in place but a break in the rule of ex-communists had taken place in 1996 when a liberal President was elected who sadly proved to be ineffective - and the old communist rule continued under Iliescu until sea captain and Bucharest ex-mayor Basescu took power in 2004. Only then can it be said that the reform of state agencies (slowly) started – very much under the eye of the EC…. Although the country was admitted (with Bulgaria) to the EU in 2007, its judicial performance (with BG's) caused sufficient concern to ensure that it was subject to continued monitoring under the terms of the Verification Mechanism. This continues....  

By then, however, the EC and EU strategy was simply to request Romania to observe the legal formalities of the AC;  and to set up and ape the institutions of old Europe (already started through “twinning” with appropriate agencies in member countries, in the last decade with the hundreds of millions of euros of EC Structural Funds managed entirely by Romania).

Tom Gallagher’s Romania and the European Union – how the weak vanquished the strong (2010) documents the sad results

Noone, it needs to be stressed, is an expert in the transition from communism to a system of liberal democracy – or whatever we want to call the European system. We need to be very clear about this….noone expected it the Wall to fall - the only remotely equivalent experience was the collapse in the 70s of the Iberian and Latin American dictatorships – so people like me had (slowly) to try to build up a new set of putative skills and capacities……with rather limited success as I try to explore in The Long Game – not the log-frame (2011)

 I can’t pretend to be an expert on Romania - since I returned only in 2009; have divided my time since then between Bulgaria and Romania; and don’t even speak the language…..

But, thanks to my Romanian partner, I did take part in workshops, for example, for Young Political Leaders led by American advisers who really shocked me for the disdain they showed for policy matters – everything was about political marketing….These, of course, were the days when everyone was preaching that the State should be dismantled….only in 1997 did the World Bank Annual Report grudgingly admit that they may have gone too far in their exhortations about privatisation…….  

Another memory I have of these days is the Head of the European Delegation (Karen Fogg 1993-98) who gave every consultant (like me) a summary of Robert Putnam’s Making Democracy Work – civic traditions in Italy (1993) which suggested that the "amoral familiasm” of southern Italian Regions had undermined their pretences at modernism and effectively placed them 300 years behind the northern regions.  Putnam indeed spawned an incredible technocratic literature on the concept of social capital and ideas on how it could be “engineered” to deal with the new alienation of modern capitalism..

Romanian communism had almost 50 years to inculcate more cooperative attitudes and behaviour – but the forced nature of “collective farms”; the forced migration of villagers to urban areas to drive industrialisation; and the scale of Securitate spying created a society where, paradoxically, no one felt able to trust.

From 1990 the market became God; Reagan and Thatcher had glorified greed; the state was bad; and television – which had been limited by Ceaucescu to 2 hours a day - the great good……As the commercial stations and journals spread, the values of instant gratification became dominant.

The short pamphlet Fighting Corruption with Con Tricks- Romania’s Assault on Democracy  just produced by the Henry Jackson Society shows absolutely no understanding of any of this……..nor the scale of theft perpetrated by business - national and international. 

I want to be fair to this article and the 20-odd page pamphlet about the Romanian both of which I have read very carefully. I think he makes some very fair points …….What, however, is missing is any balance. The scale of the plunder carried out by Romanian businessmen and politicians challenged only by the establishment a few years ago of the anti-corruption agency is never mentioned - nor the scale of the the plunder and the role of the PSD in sustaining it….

And unlike this longer academic review of the Romanian judiciary published last year, Clark’s brief coverage of the communist period’s influence on the judiciary is used simply to tar the current system with communist methods….
Clark is not stupid – he must realise that in the heavily politicised Romanian context, his paper is going to be used to weaken the only agency which has been giving ordinary Romanians some hope that their country was at last making progress toward a system which held powerful people accountable……Nor am I naïve – I understand the power various secret agencies exert here over judicial and political figures…..but that requires us to be so very careful and balanced in what we write – not to give succour to the devious        

Those who really want to get a sense of the country can do a lot worse than clicking Mapping Romania - notes on an unfinished journey