Crowds and Power in Sofia and Bucharest - III

 How, 30 years on, is post-communism doing?

I’ve been living in Bulgaria and Romania since 2007 – for a decade I enjoyed crossing the Danube, with the last 100 km stretch of the drive on the highway through the Balkans and the sight of the Vitosha mountain which dominates Sofia always bringing a particular thrill.  

The last post focused mainly on the Sofia street protests of the past 3 months – with a brief reference to the fact that only in Romania has the Crowd succeeded in toppling governments – three times in 30 years…and twice in the past five years.

This post looks at what two recent books by well-known authors born in these countries have to say about the “progress” the two countries have made since 1989 and considers the prospects for effective change

 

In the 1990s there was an interesting body of literature known as “transitology” which was effectively a retraining scheme for those in redundant Soviet and Eastern European studies University Departments as they tried to adjust to the new reality of “liberal democracy” and “free-market capitalism”.

The integration of many of these countries into the European Union seemed to leave the others in a state of suspended animation – still “transiting”.

Except that the “integration” had not gone as planned – some countries (such as Hungary and Poland) had clearly reneged on their commitments and were challenging the “rule of law” canons; and others (such as Bulgaria and Romania) had been unable to satisfy the monitors that they had even got to the required judicial standards. Indeed Philippe Schmitter, one of the doyens of the field, went so far in 2012 as to talk of “ambidextrous democratisation”

 

Bulgaria's world-renowned political scientist Ivan Krastev has (with US Stephen Holmes) written one of the surprisingly few books which attempt to assess the fortunes since 1989 of the eastern countries – although it’s primary concern seems more that of “the crisis of modern liberalism”. It’s entitled "The Light that Failed – a Reckoning” - published last year, with the Bulgarian translation appearing next month.

The book starts with a chapter on the psychological effects on central European countries of the “imitation game” they were forced to play and the demographic shock as millions left the country for a better future elsewhere; followed by one on how Putin’s Russia moved on in 2007 from imitation to “mirroring” Western hypocrisy; a chapter on Trump’s America; and a final one which takes in China.

 

The authors argue that part of the nationalist reaction in Hungary and Poland was the shock of realising that the European "normality" they had hoped for had been transformed into an agenda which included homosexuality, gay weddings and rights for Romas. But their emphasis on the “psychology of imitation” totally ignores the brazen way west European countries and companies exploited the opening which the collapse of communism gave them to extend their markets in both goods and people - with the consequences touched on in the first post and brilliantly dissected by Alexander Clapp in a 2017 New Left Review article “Romania Redivivus”.

 

Talk of “transitology” disappeared more than a decade ago and was absorbed into the Anti-Corruption (or governance integrity) field which grew into a "name and shame" industry - complete with league tables and Manuals. But the world seems to have perhaps grown weary even of its talk…  

Alina Mungiu-Pippidi is a Romanian social psychologist - appointed, in 2007, as Professor of Democracy studies of the prestigious Hertie School of Governance in Berlin - with a unique understanding and knowledge of the issue. This was her blunt assessment in 2009 of the situation in Romania

 

Unfortunately, corruption in Romania is not only related to parties and businesses, but cuts across the most important institutions of society. Romanian media has gradually been captured, after having been largely free and fair at the end of the 1990s. After 2006, concentration in media ownership continued to increase in Romania. Three owners enjoy more than two-thirds of the TV political news market.

 As long as Romania was a supplicant for entry to the EU, it had to jump through the hoops of “conditionality” to satisfy Brussels it was behaving itself. When Poland, Hungary et al were let in in 2004, the pressures started to relax - but The European Union’s Cooperation and Verification Mechanism (CVM) replaced that conditionality in 2007 and Bulgaria and Romania are still subject of an annual check of their legal and judicial health. Mungi-Pippidi therefore concluded her 2009 assessment with a simple observation - 

At the end of day, “democracy promotion” succeeds by helping the domestic drivers of change, not by doing their job for them. Only Romanians themselves can do this.

 Her latest book  "Europe's Burden - promoting good governance across. borders" (2020) is a must-read for anyone who wants to know why a quarter of a century of trying to build systems of government that people can trust has had so little effect in ex-communist countries. It starts with a sketch of Switzerland’s political development which reminds us that Napoleon was the catalyst for a 50-year period during which the Swiss embedded the basic structures we associate with that country.

It is, however, Denmark to which most countries (according to Fukuyama) aspire to – although a study of its history suggests that, contrary to Dahrendorf’s optimism, that was more like a 100 year journey.

 

Her description of her own country, Romania, is quite damning –

·         From 2010-17 there were 600 convictions for corruption EACH YEAR – including 18 Ministers and one Prime Minister, Generals, half of the Presidents of County Councils and the Presidents of all the parliamentary parties

·         The Prosecution system became thoroughly politicised through its connection with the powerful intelligence system – the infamous Securitate which was never disbanded

·         The level of wiretapping used is 16 times the level of that used by the FBI

·         Romania heads the league table of cases brought to the European Court of Human Rights dismissed for breaching the right to a fair trial – with a half of its cases so failing

·         The annual CVM reports on the country are always positive and make no mention of any of this – on the basis that “questions about the intelligence services are outside our remit”!!

·         TV stations run by those convicted of corruption have provided damning evidence of the prosecution service threatening judges and fixing evidence

 

One of Romania's most famous political analysts gave an extensive interview a couple of years ago which was important enough for me to summarise as follows –

·         the so-called “revolution” of 1989 was nothing of the sort – just a takeover by the old-guard masquerading in the costumes of the market economy and democracy

·         which, after 30 years, has incubated a new anomie – with the “social” media dominating people’s minds

·         “European integration” has destroyed Romanian agriculture and industry - and drained the country of 4 million talented young Romanians

·         After 30 years, there is not a single part of the system – economic, political, religious, cultural, voluntary – which offers any real prospect of positive change

·         Even Brussels seems to have written the country off

·         The country is locked into a paralysis of suspicion, distrust, consumerism, apathy, anomie

·         No one is calling for a new start – let alone demonstrating the potential for realistic alliances

 

Dorel Sandor has clearly given up on the politicians and confessed to a hopelessness for the prospect of any sort of change in his country

 

“The stark reality is now that we do not have political parties any more. The Romanian political environment is in fact an ensemble of ordinary gangs that try to survive the process and jail and eventually save their wealth in the country or abroad. That's all! Romania has no rulers. It has mobsters in buildings with signs that say "The Ministry of Fish that Blooms".

One of the reasons why the EU is not too concerned about us is that it is that they reckon that you can only reform a driver with a car that works. We are a two-wheeled wagon and two horses, a chaotic space, broken into pieces. What's to reform? So it's a big difference.”

 

But he was least convincing when he tried to offer a way forward

 

I have a list of what to do – starting with the need for an exploration of what sort of Romania we should be aiming for in the next few decades. Such a process would be moderated by professionals using proper diagnostics, scenario thinking and milestones.

It would be managed by a group with a vision emancipated from the toxic present.

 

I have a lot of sympathy for such approaches – embodied, for example, in the "Future Search" method. But effective social change rarely comes from such an elitist approach; any such effort would have to demonstrate exactly how it would propose to deal with the astonishing level of distrust of others in the country.

In 2014, only 7% of the Romanian population could say that “most people can be trusted” (compared with about 20% in Italy and 40% in Germany).

 

The revelation of the collusion between the infamous Securitate and the Anti-Corruption Agency (DNA) has understandably fanned the flames of paranoia for which the Romanians can be forgiven - given the scale of the surveillance of the population the Securitate enjoyed under Ceausescu. Little wonder half of the population are Covid sceptics

 

Conclusion

In the 1980s it was Solidarity in Poland; Charter 77 in Czechoslovakia; and reformers in Hungary who were challenging the power structure – I remember taking the opportunity of being in the country to visit the Party’s “White House” in Budapest in 1987 to talk with a spokesman for the latter.

Bulgaria and Romania, on the other hand, were monolithic and frozen societies – with the only sign of discord being the odd Romanian poet – and on the Danube where protestors against a chemical plant included a few establishment figures such as Svetlin Rusev.

 

But the street has become much more active in the past decade – even if it is the more educated and “entitled” who are prominent there. And it is “the Crowd” that the power elite has always feared – particularly in the last century eg the infamous “Revolt of the Masses” (1930). And who can ever forget the moment when the massed crowd turned against Ceausescu in December 1989 – within minutes, he had been hoisted from his balcony by helicopter and, within days, summarily tried and shot.

 

It’s noticeable that the figures whose words I’ve quoted – Dahrendorf, Canetti, Krastev, Mungiu-Pippidi and Sandor – all represent the intelligentsia. I was brought up to take their words seriously - but they are not activists!  

The sadly-missed David Graeber was one of the very few such people prepared to get his hands dirty… to work across the barriers that normally divide people and to try to forge new coalitions…

 

The Crowd needs people like Graeber who understand how to bridge such barriers…………..particularly between the “downtrodden masses” and the “entitled”

Where is Bulgaria’s Graeber? There are, actually, several eg Vanya Grigorova – the economic adviser of the labour union “Podkrepa” (Support) and leading left-wing public figure – who has been travelling the country to present her latest book on labour rights and how to claim them. A year ago she gave this interview to Jacobin, which positioned her on the side of social change in Bulgaria and the region.

 

Both Covid19 and the greater concern about global warming - as embodied, for example in the recent Extinction Rebellion – suggest that the “normality” being sought by the entitled is a will o’ the wisp.

The Sofia protestors would therefore be well advised to widen the scope of their agenda. After all, smaller countries generally seem better able to “do” change viz Switzerland, Iceland, Denmark, Singapore, Estonia, Slovenia – particularly when they have women at their helm who have a combination of trustworthiness and strategic vision!!

 

Especially for them I updated my list of essential reading for activists – adding my own “opportunistic” theory of change which emphasises the element of individual responsibility as well as the dynamic of the crowd viz

 

“Most of the time our systems seem impervious to change – but always (and suddenly) an opportunity arises. Those who care about the future of their society, prepare for these “windows of opportunity – through proper analysis, mobilisation and integrity. It involves– 

·         speaking out about the need for change

·         learning the lessons of previous change efforts

·         creating and running networks of change

·         which mobilise social forces

·         understanding crowd dynamics

·         reaching out to forge coalitions

·         building credibility

 

I grant you that the time for preparation is over in Sofia; and appreciate that some of this may come across as rather elitist but the process it describes is still a crucial one – prepare, analyse, network, speak out, build coalitions, mobilise, no hidden games…..It’s a tough combination……

Crowds and Power in Sofia and Bucharest - II

The Nobel-prize winning author Elias Canetti was born in the Bulgarian city of Russe on the Danube in 1905 and would have had quite a few things to say about the protests in Sofia. Better known ironically (thanks to his own autobiographical efforts) as one of British novelist and philosopher Iris Murdoch’s many lovers, his “Crowds and Power” (1960) vies with Le Bon’s as the classic treatise on the subject. The book - a  strange mixture of anthropology and social psychology and now, understandably, enjoying a new lease of life - warned of the unpredictable ebb and flow of the crowd. It is, most definitely, not a Marxist take on the subject – for which one should turn to criminologist Matt Clement’s “A People’s History of Riot, Protest and the Law – the Sound of the Crowd” (2016)

Vlad Mitev is a young Bulgarian journalist who also lives in Russe and has a trilingual HYPERLINK "https://movafaq.wordpress.com/category/limba-език-language/english/"Bridge of Friendship blogHYPERLINK "https://movafaq.wordpress.com/category/limba-език-language/english/" which covers political and cultural developments on both sides of that last section of the river Danube. He’s also editor of the Romanian section of "HYPERLINK "https://en.baricada.org/"BaricadaHYPERLINK "https://en.baricada.org/""HYPERLINK "https://en.baricada.org/" , a leftist journal based in Sofia which boasts Bulgarian, Polish and Romanian writers. He and I worked together on an early draft of this piece before deciding to focus on what we each felt we knew best. I’m also grateful for the insights I’ve gained over the years from Daniela, my Romanian companion and conspirator,

Ralf Dahrendorf was a famous German sociologist/UK statesman who wrote in 1990 an extended public letter first published under the title “Reflections on the Revolution in Europe” and then expanded as “Reflections on the Revolution of our Time”. In it he made the comment that it would take

·         one or two years to create new institutions of political democracy in the recently liberated countries of central Europe;

·         maybe five to 10 years to reform the economy and make a market economy; and

·         15 to 20 years to create the rule of law.

·         some two generations to create a functioning civil society there.

 

What had in 1989 seemed a bloody Revolution in Romania was later exposed as more of a simple regime change. Personnel and systems remained in place and it was to be 1996 - with the election of Emil Constantinescu as President - before new winds started to challenge the old systems and structures of power. By then the scions of the country's privileged families were being inculcated in the pro-market celebratory doctrines that pass for education in American Business Schools; and the country's (strong) intelligentsia had spent several years quaffing at Friedrich Hayek's fountain.

 

Privatisation was at last allowed to let rip – with the local oligarchs soon becoming indistinguishable from the politicians.

When Bulgaria’s PM Ivan Kostov was asked why crony capitalism was flourishing under his rule, his revealing comments was

 

“Bulgaria is a small country. We are all cousins”

 

Eastern Europe as a whole was offered a deadly deal which has almost destroyed these countries – almost 2 million Bulgarians and Romanians prop up the British and German economies; Bulgaria has the unenviable position of losing its population at a faster rate than any other country in the world - and Romania is not far behind. And the pensioners who are expected to exist on a monthly pension of less than 200 euros a month – when the prices in the shops are at western level.

 

Austrian and Italian companies have taken over the jewels of the Bulgarian and Romanian timber, banking and agribusiness sectors after the massive privatisation which was made a condition of their membership of the EU and NATO.

That last has meant of course militarisation, high expenditures on military procurement and reduced social spending. Bulgaria recently concluded a deal for American fighter aircraft at a cost of 2 billion dollars – placing it at the top of the global table for increased military spending since 2010 – with a 167% increase (Romania is at 150%)

 

The Bulgarian protests

But it is the EC Structural Funds with their hundreds of billions of euros which lie behind the ongoing street protests in Sofia - directed generally against the country's systemic corruption and, specifically, against Prime Minister Borisov (who used to be the bodyguard of first the ex-dictator Zhivkov and then PM King Simeon II) as well as the Chief Prosecutor Ivan Geshev - whose raid on the offices of popular President Radev in July raised big questions.

Unlike previous street protests in Sofia, this one has attracted wider support – for example from a previous Justice Minister, Hristo Ivanov who launched a mock incursion on the Black Sea home of one of the country’s political oligarchs

 

The incident transformed Ivanov’s image from detached intellectual to maverick politician setting the terms of public debate, and his centre-right Democratic Bulgaria coalition doubled its support in the polls. “This was not simply the PR action of the year but of the decade,” said Petar Cholakov, a political analyst and sociologist from the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences.

 

The two countries separated by the River Danube don't usually have a great deal to do with one another - one is strongly in the EU/Atlantic Alliance camp - the other's 150-year-old ties with Russia still reverberate. But, in recent years, Romania (at least in western eyes) has made significant progress in fighting corruption - measured at least in terms of the number of politicians and ex-Ministers it has managed to put in jail. When Bulgarian activists began to call this out, the power structure tried to defuse the situation by appointing a crony as Prosecutor-General. This is a position which, unlike in Romania, has never been the subject of any reform.

 

Vlad Mitev’s recent Open Democracy article Bulgarian Protests - battle over anti-corruption gives some of the background to the Sofia protests

 

The Romanian anti-corruption formula was popular in Bulgaria until 2017-2018. Romanian anti-corruption had gained its fame under the leadership of the former chief prosecutor of the National Anti-corruption Directorate (DNA) Laura Kövesi, now chief prosecutor of the European Public Prosecutor’s Office.

 

As Romanian Chief prosecutor from 2013 to 2018, she presided over numerous arrests of politicians, widely reported in the international press. The “Romanian model of anti-corruption” was lauded in the western media as an exemplary model for delivering justice and building the rule of law. The model of anti-corruption based on a powerful Chief Prosecutor’s office thus came to be seen in Bulgaria as a path towards a European standard of living. The Bulgarian middle class seemed to envy their Romanian counterparts...

 

But a subsequent article by Mitev in “Baricada” laid more emphasis on the class nature evident in the protests – which the western media has totally failed to pick up -

 

It is interesting to note that in the earlier wave of anti-oligarchic protests in Bulgaria in 2013 the protesters were called by media and society “the beautiful and the clever ones”, which was a direct reference to the narcissism of their representatives’ and to the abyss that divides them from the “ugly” and “stupid” masses. Romania has an almost exact notion of the same type: “the beautiful and the free youth”, which gets abbreviated as “Tefelists” (TFL – tineri frumoşi şi liberi – beautiful and free youth).

These are important signals that important parts of the overall population feel distant and maybe even ethically superior to these protesting elites, who in turn believe that it is they who hold the ethical higher ground. And these notions have been used by politicians in a divide and conquer manner.

 

What was imported from Romania was the idea of an unrestrained Chief Prosecutor which suited Bulgaria’s new man Geshev down to the ground – as Mihai Evans explains in a recent Open Democracy article.

 

As the system is currently constituted there are simply no checks and balances that can rein in the conduct of the Bulgarian Prosecutor General, a position which is largely in the political gift of the government. The holder of this office has effective command of the entire judicial system and can stop any investigation, including a hypothetical one against himself. This has resulted in conduct that reached a nadir in a shocking series of events which saw a senior prosecutor murdered after making strongly worded criticisms of the then Prosecutor General. This appalling episode has never been satisfactory cleared up by investigators or the legal system. The family of the murdered man took a case, Kolevi v Bulgaria, to the European Court of Human Rights whose ruling was that Bulgaria must engage in extensive reforms of the prosecutors office.

 

Over a period of more than a decade, largely coinciding with the governments of Borisov, it has failed to do so. As a result, as Radosveta Vassileva, a fellow at University College, London’s Faculty of Law argues: “Bulgaria is permanently torn by scandals regarding non-random distribution of case files, abuses of judges and prosecutors who resist political orders, purposeful destruction of evidence by authorities etc.”. In recent years Bulgaria has been repeatedly convicted of violations of Article 6 of the European Convention on Human Rights for failing to ensure the rights of the accused. The Specialised Court for Organised Crime, a parallel system of courts ostensibly established to combat corruption have failed to convict a single politician (in contrast to Romania where dozens have been imprisoned, including the leader of the ruling Social Democrat Party last year). Legal scholars have accused both countries of failing to provide fair trials.

 

The Sofia protesters’ demand of a reform to the Bulgarian constitution (with the chief prosecutor’s prerogatives being curbed, the political influence over the judicial system curtailed and the judiciary strengthened) certainly suggests a continuing degree of faith in Bulgarian institutions or at least in their capacity to reform and be held accountable.

 

Pre Covid Hopes of “Normality”

"For a normal Romania" was the slogan used by the campaign of the ex-Mayor of the Transylvanian city of Sibiu in last autumn's elections as he fought to retain the Presidency he had surprisingly grabbed in 2015 from the jaws of defeat. The slogan expressed the dreams of many - not least the millions of younger Romanians (and Bulgarians) forced to emigrate in search of that dream.

 

Street protests in both countries are nothing new - although only in Romania have they succeeded in recent years in toppling governments. A so-called Social Democratic (PSD) government fell in 2015 as a result of a deadly fire in a Bucharest nightclub which exposed the scandalously lax regulations sustained by the greasing of hands.

Another scandal which engulfed Romania last summer started with the murder of a teenager whose terrified phone-call to the police was totally ignored. The revelation of the scale of the collusion between the Secret Service, prosecutors and the Anti-Corruption Agency in the country (a veritable Deep State) eventually led to the collapse of that PSD government as well - and the re-election in the subsequent Presidential election of the slow-witted but polarising Transylvanian Klaus Johannis

 

Bulgaria and Romania may have joined the EU in 2007 after a bit of a hiccup but they both still operate under a judicial cloud in the form of The Cooperation and Verification Mechanism (CVM) which subjects each country to an annual check of its legal and judicial health. Neither Bulgaria nor Romania are happy with the continued EU scrutiny but have at least managed to avoid the threat of sanctions which continues to hang over Hungary and Poland. And both countries have, largely, managed post-1989 to escape the right-wing virus to which they were exposed in the interwar period. For that we should all be profoundly grateful.

 

But neither country has been able to shake off the legacy of its past - which is much longer than just the half-century of communist influence. The Ottoman Empire had several centuries to engineer human souls – with the Greek Phanariots being given a measure of licence in Romania to exploit the locals whereas the Bulgarians lived under the direct yoke of the Ottomans.

In that respect, Dahrendorf was a bit optimistic in 1990 in suggesting that it would it take only 20 years to embed the Rule of Law and 2 generations (say 50 years) for civil society to be properly functioning! 

I’ll continue this post later

Crowds in Sofia and Bucharest part I

 Blogging is a pretty solitary affair so it was a real pleasure to get an approach from the man behind Boffy’s Blog and asked if I would be interested in doing the odd guest post on his blog about political events going on in the Balkans. I can, of course, speak only about the 2 countries in which I’ve lived for the past decade and more – Bulgaria and Romania - about which I have occasionally posted. Boffy’s invitation coincided with the start of the street protests in Sofia

In recent weeks, events in Belarus have meant that the world’s attention to the Sofia drama - now into its third month – has slipped down the agenda. Somewhat belatedly, therefore, let me bring my readers up to speed – starting with this introductory summary of my particular interest. My Guest Post will then follow – in two parts….

 

Bulgaria (7 million souls) and Romania (19 million) entered the EU in 2007 - with British stereotypes of the countries covering such images as poisoned umbrellas, cheap plonk, vampires, sea and sand and, more recently, both casual labour and professional skills.

Apart from that, we know little about either country – although some people may have a vague memory of Kenneth Branagh and Emma Thompson arriving in Bucharest in 1941 in the TV series based on Olivia Manning’s brilliant “Fortunes of War - the Balkan Trilogy”. Only a handful of anglo-saxon historians and the occasional writer (such as Kapka Kassabova) offer insights about the two countries

 

Coincidentally, 2007 was the year I returned to a mountain house in the Carpathians after a spell of 8 years in Central Asia – only to go to Sofia to lead a project for training Bulgarian regional officials in the compliance system for EC regulations (in those days the migration was both ways!).

The powers-that-be were obviously sleeping when the bids for the contract were opened that day - because it was an Italian company which slipped through the nets to win the multi-million project. And it was therefore with some difficulty that the team I headed was actually permitted, after some delay, to start its work.

 

But I took both countries so much to my heart that I spent the next decade wintering in Sofia and summering in Romania; and it is from this vantage point that I dare to offer comment on what are actually very complex recent developments in both countries. 

Those interested in knowing more can tap into the two E-books I have written about the countries – 

Bulgarian Realists – getting to know the Bulgarians through their art; and 

Mapping Romania – notes on an unfinished journey

Another Milestone!

 "Peripheral Vision” has just celebrated the 400,000^th click. That’s just under 40,000 a year – about 100 a day. Not great – but I don’t do it for the fan mail…I do it from my own recognition that, until I have struggled to express in writing what I understand about a subject, that understanding will be deficient.

I’m confident I understand an issue but, when I start putting that understanding into words and sentences, I suddenly realise that there are things I didn’t actually understand    

One writer offers no less than 15 justifications for why people should blog. I would go with nine –

1. You’ll become a better thinker. Because the process of writing includes recording thoughts on paper, the blogging process makes you question what you thought you knew. You will delve deeper into the matters of your life and the worldview that shapes them.

 2. You’ll become a better writer.  – once, that is, you start to reread your material or get feedback which shows your text was ambiguous…

 3. You’ll live a more intentional life. Once you start writing about your life and the thoughts that shape it, you’ll begin thinking more intentionally about who you are, who you are becoming, and whether you like what you see or not. And that just may be reason enough to get started.

 4. You’ll develop an eye for meaningful things. By necessity, blogging requires a filter. It’s simply not possible to write about every event, every thought, and every happening in your life. Instead, blogging is a never-ending process of choosing to articulate the most meaningful events and the most important thoughts. This process of choice helps you develop an eye for meaningful things.

 5. It’ll lead to healthier life habits (although my partner doesn’t agree!)! Blogging requires time, devotion, commitment, and discipline. And just to be clear, those are all good things to embrace – they will help you get the most out of your days and life.

 6. You’ll inspire others. Blogging not only changes your life, it also changes the life of the reader. And because blogs are free for the audience and open to the public, on many levels, it is an act of giving. It is a selfless act of service to invest your time, energy, and worldview into a piece of writing and then offer it free to anybody who wants to read it. Others will find inspiration in your writing… and that’s a wonderful feeling.

 7. You’ll become more well-rounded in your mindset. After all, blogging is an exercise in give-and-take. One of the greatest differences between blogging and traditional publishing is the opportunity for readers to offer input. As the blog’s writer, you introduce a topic that you feel is significant and meaningful. You take time to lay out a subject in the minds of your readers and offer your thoughts on the topic. Then, the readers get to respond. And often times, their responses in the comment section challenge us to take a new, fresh look at the very topic we thought was so important in the first place.

 8. It’ll serve as a personal journal. It trains our minds to track life and articulate the changes we are experiencing. Your blog becomes a digital record of your life that is saved “in the cloud.” As a result, it can never be lost, stolen, or destroyed in a fire.

 9. You’ll become more confident. Blogging will help you discover more confidence in your life. You will quickly realize that you do live an important life with a unique view and have something to offer others.

 That puts it rather well – although I would amplify the first point by emphasising the sharpened critical faculty regular blogging also brings to the reading of what others write. Thomas Hardy was spot on when he (apparently) said - “How can I know what I think until I read what I write?" You thought you knew something but, when you read back your own first effort at explanation, you immediately have questions – both of substance and style.

But this also conveys itself very quickly to changes in the way that you read other people’s material – you learn more and faster from a critical dialogue (even with yourself) than from passive reading…..

 That’s why they say that the best way to learn about a subject is to (try to) write a book about it (rather than reading several books). It sounds paradoxical (as well as presumptuous) but it’s actually true – and the reason is simple.

Translating your imagined understanding into a written summary allows a dialogue with the books – which has the added advantage of helping you better remember the issues….  

Blogger Duncan Green makes another important point that –  

regular blogging builds up a handy, time-saving archive. I’ve been blogging daily since 2008. OK, that’s a little excessive, but what that means is that essentially I have a download of my brain activity over the last 7 years – almost every book and papers I’ve read, conversations and debates.

Whenever anyone wants to consult me, I have a set of links I can send (which saves huge amounts of time). And raw material for the next presentation, paper or book.

 

Links I Liked

 1. Heads or Hands?

It’s interesting that we should get 2 new books in a single month challenging one of the basic principles of our times – namely meritocracy.

That they should appear just as we began to notice the paradox of the “essential workers” (nurses, dustbin-men) earning a pittance whilst the “symbolic analysts” (in Reich’s famous phrase) sit on their backsides and rake in millions is nothing short of prescient.  

The Tyranny of Merit – what’s become of the common good? is philosopher Michael Sandel’s attack on the principle which, he argues, has led to hubris amongst the victors and humiliation amongst the losers. In 2009 Sandel delivered the prestigious BBC Reith Lecture for that year – on “Markets and Morals”

 David Goodhart is unlikely to receive such an invitation (although under the present Johnson government anything is possible). His work is too challenging – if not distasteful - for well-endowed liberal cosmopolitans. He does, however, have my respectful attention.   

In his just-published Head, Hand, Heart – the struggle for dignity and status in the 21^st Century, Goodhart dares to question the emphasis on the importance of university education which became such a shibboleth in the 1970s….- unlike the more sensible Germany….who have always prized and honoured practical skills and had a strong vocational training tradition.

 2. Germany as Exemplar?

I have this past week been working on an article about the Sofia street protests for a guest post the first part of which will appear tomorrow (Tuesday) on Boffy’s Blog - and then on this one.

The article asks what progress central and eastern Europe has or has not made in the past 30 years…starting with a quote from a famous little book “Reflections on the Revolution in Europe” written in 1990 by the anglo-german academic and liberal statesman, Ralf Dahrendorf – to the effect that the development of effective civil society would take 2 generations (viz 50 years)    

 Dahrendorf was a brilliant Anglo-German intellectual who, more than 30 years before his “Revolution in Europe”, had written a revisionist take on “Class and Class Conflict in Industrial Society” (1959 Eng trans) with which I was very taken just as I was starting my political sociology course.

A few years later he wrote a highly provocative analysis of his country - Society and Democracy in Germany (1967 Eng trans) – which argued that Germany could only then be called a “modern” society…..Nazism had at last broken the deference to authority which had until then been the country’s defining feature - this a mere 2 decades after Germany’s “Stunde Null”. The book caused quite a controversy both within and outside Germany. Geoffrey Eley was one British historian who disputed the analysis and went on to write an entire book about The Peculiarities of German History (1984)

 I’m reminded of all this by the release of yet another book about Germany - Why the Germans do it better – notes from a grown-up country

In the 1960s it was France and its planning system that many of us admired….it took another decade before we realised that the German Federal and training systems and worker representation on Boards were healthy features worth studying more closely.

It’s difficult to remember that the UK was the object of universal admiration if not envy – whereas it is now seen as a bit of a Banana Republic. Just look at the latest post on Chris Gray’s Brexit Blog – the descent into political insanity

I suppose one lesson is that all fortunes fall and rise – no one should ever give up hope on their country?

 3. Political Hubris – why we need to think seriously of Democracy by Lot

The idea of Citizen Assemblies has always impressed me – this article gives some recent examples.

It was Robert Michels’ Political Parties – a sociological study of the oligarchic tendencies of modern democracy (1911) which had alerted me in the 1960s to the insidious slide of political leadership - and made me so sympathetic to the German Greens attempts to control its leadership.  

 Pat Chalmers is one person with a vision of a different way of doing things. Author of Fraudcast News – how bad journalism supports our bogus democracies he has been campaigning for Democracy by Lot for some years.

After the recent UK and US experience of political leadership – which has allowed so-called leaders to run amok, I am at last persuaded that we do need to look seriously at this idea. We could start with this article….  

So Isst die Welt – und must nicht so sein*

 Warning; this post will appeal only to those with an interest in the strange byways one’s life often takes

I like books which give a sense of the personality behind famous works. My field is that of “social intervention” – which covers people’s efforts to improve social conditions. And books about the lives of key social scientists - such as development economists – are of particular interest.

I do, of course, have a bit of a love-hate relationship to social science but I have a soft spot for the giants of political science - who were few and far between in the first half of the Century but have mushroomed since then…..

Comparative European Politics – the story of a Profession; ed Hans Daalder (1997) is one of my favourite books of this sort. It gives 27 prominent European political scientists the opportunity to sketch the personal choices and friendships they made in the post-war period as they came together in the early days of what has become a strong European network

Learning about Politics - in time and space; Richard Rose (2014) is a superbly-written life memoir by a younger member of that group (still going strong at 87) – covering the choices he made. I remember him well from my Scottish days where he was a bit of a maverick figure with an interest in the North Ireland quagmire - moving on in later years to cover "policy transfer and learning" and Eastern Europe developments. For me it’s a fascinating book - written in the simple (if not elegant) style which characterises all his work - as befits someone who was, in his early life in the US, a journalist.

In that same spirit I want to explore the byways which have led to my current passion (fixation) for public administration…..

“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 “tradition” so well described in David Kynaston’s social history series on post-war Britain which started with 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) was a highly seductive for my generation - ….

I had just graduated from University when a Labour Government came to power in 1964 – after 13 years of Conservative rule and headed to London, initially for a post-graduate course in political sociology but, after a few months, switched to research work with a government “Manpower” unit.

But I had a practical bent and had always been interested in regional development and politics and the writings of Labour and leftist intellectuals such as Tony Crosland and John Mackintosh. The latter had been a tutor of mine whom I met subsequently in parliament to discuss his take on local government reorganisation and devolution – Crosland the author of the definitive The Future of Socialism (1956) whom I had hosted when he visited local party HQ in my home town…..

Fifty years ago, graduates like me didn’t need inviting to get involved in politics – we had role models and change was in the air….The older generation patently needed replacing, we thought, and we were the ones to do it.

The need for reform of our institutions (and the power structures they sustained) became a dominant theme in my life when, in 1968, I found myself representing the east end of a shipbuilding town.

I had eagerly absorbed the writing which was coming from American progressive academics (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”…..

 Having got myself elected, I needed a project – and community action supplied it. I may not have been involved in the student action of 68 but I was affected by the challenge to authority it represented and by the sudden fashion for participation.

The electors of the east end of the town I represented lived and worked next to the shipyards which had supplied the town’s livelihood for the previous century. But employment was increasingly precarious – and the housing conditions poor.

So I was soon leading neighbourhood action and encouraging self-help activities in the education and leisure fields….

And within 3 years I had managerial responsibility (of a sort) – supplying the political leadership for a new Social Work agency which had been set up by the reforming Labour government of 1964-70.  

That’s where I learned about the importance of social interventions and gained a wider reputation - which stood me in good stead when a massive new Regional Council was set up in 1974 covering half of Scotland. I not only became one of the 103 politicians elected to manage it (and its 100,000 teachers, engineers, social workers etc) but one of what was called the “Gang of Four” to lead it….

I still had academic aspirations, however, as is clear from this paper I wrote in 1977 on Community Development – its political and administrative challenge which was indeed reprinted in a UK book "Readings in Community Work” ed by Henderson, Paul and Thomas (1981)

*“This is the how world is (the spelling of the word is a pun denoting “eating”) - and must not be” (Brecht)

Strategies for Governing

The origins of my fixation with public management can be traced back to an odd mix of characters – from RH Tawney, an uncompromising non-conformist English socialist from the early part of the 20^th century and Welsh firebrand Nye Bevan - to smooth-talking academics such as Bernard Crick, John Mackintosh and Chris Hood in the UK; Donald Schoen, P Marris and M Rein and Aaron Wildavsky on the other side of the Atlantic - with a strange mix of Tony Crosland (of “Future of Socialism” fame) and the community activist Saul Alinsky thrown in to give spice and complexity to the brew…. 

Tawney and Bevan supplied the passion; Crosland, Hood, Mackintosh, Marris/Rein, Schoen and Wildavsky the cool reasoning; and Alinsky some of the tools of early activism…

The argument in Bernard Crick’s “In Defence of Politics” (1962) that politics was an important and honourable activity was a fresh and powerful one when I first read his book at University and undoubtedly played a role in my becoming in 1968 a local politician - and occupying a senior, reforming position in the West of Scotland for more than 20 years. For the subsequent 20 years I was a nomadic consultant in something called “institutional development” which my mother, understandably, simply couldn’t understand….

This was the start of what I wanted to be a short intro to, and commentary on, a new book about public admin which has just arrived. I felt I needed to put the book in the wider context of how this important subject has landed up with such a boring reputation with citizens – even if (because?) it inspires tens of thousands of academic devotees. But the text just ran away with me – so I have pushed that question away for the time being and will focus simply for the moment on the book itself

Bear in mind that my library already has a couple of hundred books and thousands of articles on this subject of public admin or public management as we learned to call it from 1990. Why should I need another?

But this one, called “Strategies for Governing; reinventing public administration for a dangerous century”  (2019) by Alasdair Roberts seemed different – its Intro was clearly arguing that something was seriously wrong with the subject

We must recover the capacity to talk about the fundamentals of government, because the fundamentals matter immensely. Right now, there are billions of people on this planet who suffer terribly because governments cannot perform basic functions properly.

People live in fear because governments cannot protect their homes from war and crime. They live in poverty because governments cannot create the conditions for trade and commerce to thrive.

They live in pain because governments cannot stop the spread of disease.

And they live in ignorance because governments do not provide opportunities for education.

The expectations that we hold of our leaders can be stated simply: They should protect us from foreign enemies, maintain internal order, increase prosperity, improve well-being, and provide justice. Even in the twenty-first century, most governments on this planet fail to do this

The leaders of modern-day states have a difficult job.

- They must devise a strategy for leading their countries toward security, order, prosperity, and justice.

- Next, they must design and build institutions that translate their strategy into practice.

- And then they must deal with the vicissitudes of time and chance, adapting strategies and institutions in response to altered circumstances and unexpected events.

To do this well, leaders need advice about the machinery of government—what it is capable of doing, how it should be designed and constructed, how it ought to be run, and how it can be reconstructed.

The book took only a couple of weeks to reach me in my Carpathian mountain house; I raced through it; and am deeply impressed. Let me simply say that the book

- is one of the most important half dozen or so books in the English language on the subject

- is superbly written – and structured (short chapters)

- gives the subject of the state (and its good management) back its central significance in people’s lives

Most people may find public admin boring – but, if they are honest, they will also admit that most economics leaves them mystified. This blog has recently emphasised the huge dangers of leaving the fate of our society so much in the hands of the economists. But the same might be said of the public admin/management scribblers who have succeeded, with a very few exceptions, in making their subject boring and inaccessible.

Of course, it’s not fair to put all the blame on academics – journalists and politicians also bear a heavy responsibility for the strange combination of hype and omission which passes for commentary on public affairs….Only last month I wrote an important post about Covid19 raising profound questions about how differently eastern states were managing the pandemic

“Strategies for Governing” was written before the pandemic but, rightly in my view, reminds us that it is individuals who manage the public sector and that skills of statecraft have been ignored for too long (apart from people like John Bryson and Mark Moore) – with the focus too much instead on issues of micro-management and of ideology. The very word “governing” in its title is so refreshing after all the reified nonsense we’ve had about “governance”

This is the first of what I suspect will be a series of posts…..