"What am I good at/for?" - a SWOT approach

Readers know that one of the few blogs I regularly check is the contrarian one of another Scot who worked in Uzbekistan (as British Ambassador) just after I had left my 3 –year assignment there in 2001 -  the blog of Craig Murray. He has been a thorn in the flesh of not only the British, Uzbek and American Governments - for his early revelations of Uzbek torture condoned by the Brits and continued by the Yanks. These cost him his position but he was subsequently vindicated (by no less a body than the US Senate Intelligence Committee - a misnomer if ever there was one!!!).

But his beloved Scottish Nationalist party then lacked the guts (and intelligence) to accept him as an official candidate for the 2015 General election – despite his sterling (!) work for them………

He poses on today’s post the most critical question any man can ask -

I am confused as to what I might usefully do with my life. I suppose the question I have been pondering is, what good am I?

Anyone who reaches his/her late 50s and has had the sort of rich work experience enjoyed by many born in the immediate post-war period; good health; and reasonable and accessible capital should have been asking Craig’s question for the past decade…..

Fifteen years ago, in a similar mood, I posed not one but five questions in a short paper called A Draft Guide for the Perplexed -

- why I was pessimistic about the future and so unhappy with what the French then  called “La Pensee Unique”, the post 1989 “Washington consensus”

- who were the organisations and people I felt were fighting for a better world

- what they were achieving - and what not

- how these gaps could be reduced

- how with my resources I could help that process

The paper has been updated every few years until its latest version

Craig asks the blunt question of What good he is - which is a slightly disparaging way of putting things. A more useful question is “What am I good FOR?” In other words, to what purpose should someone of my age, experience and resources (time, networks, money etc) turn this latter stage of his life?

We all admire older people who have resisted the temptation to rest on their laurels and have turned their experience and energies to serve a larger purpose – eg Stephane Hessel,

- Initially I thought I might leave some money to a Trust Fund to honour my father’s memory as a West of Scotland public man; or to celebrate the sort of community enterprise I’ve been associated with. But my family has no claim to fame – and such ventures tend to peter out after the initial years of enthusiasm. 
- So, in 2009, I started this blog and also a website with some of my papers with no less a purpose than leaving behind a record of how one 20^th century man thought of the world he had been lucky enough to experience…… 

- Then, with a newfound passion for Bulgarian painting (and one foot now in Romania and another in Bulgaria), I briefly entertained the notion of organising a summer painting retreat to help break down the barrier of indifference which seems to exist between these two nations.   
- At one stage I became so desperate about the rise of corporate greed that I actually contemplated launching the idea of a geriatric kamikaze mission to target the financial class - on the Mintzberg argument that the vanishing "people power" of trade unions and voters needed some strengthening to ensure the "rebalancing of society". But I quickly realised that this would merely further strengthen the repressive power of the "security state" which has replaced our mixed economies and liberal democracies....

- Last year I launched a second, specially designed, website with a larger capacity – Mapping the Common Ground - as a resource for those who share my concerns and want to do some sharing…...On to it I uploaded not only my own books and essays but more than a hundred books which I thought would be helpful to others struggling with my questions…… But, after six years of the blog and one year of the website, I have to confess there’s not been much response.

Craig’s question is a good one since it forces us to do a SWOT analysis – and to try to craft a strategy for this phase of our life on its results. I know that when I first did the Belbin test about team roles about 15 years ago, I had expected to come out as a “leader”. But I was not altogether surprised to discover that I was more of a “resource person”. There’s not much point setting out to build an orphanage if you don’t like children!

I’ve been lucky enough to have been “my own man” for most of my life – an academic of a sort for 17 years but able to devote more time to a role as an (influential) elected official; maintaining a senior position for 22 years through a dozen  elections by colleagues; since 1990 a maverick consultant who has challenged the conventional wisdom.

What good am I? Bluntly expressed - just reading, writing and looking/exploring!

What do I offer the world?
- The results of broad and deep reading over 50 years about social science matters 
- The practice of thinking out aloud since 1970 - in short papers about the work in which I was involved (see “lessons learned” on the new website for those from the past 20 years; “E-books” for almost a dozen of that genre)
- More than 1000 mini-essays with almost 10,000 hyperlinks – on the blog Balkan and Carpathian Musings
- the results of pretty intensive net-surfing for relevant writing over the past decade -available in Mapping the Common Ground’s library

Of course that still doesn’t answer the question which has been nagging me for the past 15 years – of where I should be putting my experience and resources…….!!

How Change Happens

Yesterday’s post was sparked off by a book and a paper with this title. Kzarnic’s paper was written in 2007 (although I came across only yesterday in the book) and is simply the best introduction to the topic I have come across – identifying what for him are the core approaches which the various intellectual disciplines offer to explain change – whether that change is described as “technical”, “economic”, “political” or “organizational”. And adding some multi-disciplinary approaches for good measure….

Green’s book focuses on one very small part of the picture - “people power” in poor “developing” countries, emphasizing right from the start that - 

Activists seeking social and political change usually focus their efforts on those who wield visible power, presidents, prime ministers and CEOs, since they hold apparent authority over the matter at hand. Yet the hierarchy of visible power is underpinned by subtle interactions among a more diverse set of players. Hidden power‘ describes what goes on behind the scenes: the lobbyists, the corporate chequebooks, the Old Boys Network.

Hidden power also comprises the shared view of what those in power consider sensible or reasonable in public debate. Any environmentalist who has sat across the table from government officials or mainstream economists and dared to question the advisability of unlimited economic growth in a resource-constrained world will have met the blank faces that confront anyone breaching those boundaries.

I’m long enough in the tooth to have seen many times the “conventional wisdom” of everyday conversation become a forgotten tale and am constantly amazed by how easily people move from one discredited world view to another without beginning to develop some scepticism about that conventional wisdom……    

Yesterday’s post tracked my own journey of discovery about “change” and power – first as a Scottish politician working with community groups, political colleagues, official advisers, academics and journalists; and, since 1990, as a consultant working to European bureaucracy and with Central European and Central Asian technocrats and politicians – local and national – all the time trying to keep up with the burgeoning relevant literature in fields such as “managing change”, “institutional reform” and “developing capacities”   

This experience suggests that there are actually four very different bodies of thinking and writing about “change – and how it happens” - each using different language and each with different audiences and loyalties…..

- Managing Change – the “management of change” literature was written by management consultants looking for markets and hit a peak about 15 years ago. The ultimate business guru book is an excellent introduction to the people and ideas on which that genre drew.  Critical management studies (CMS) was an interesting (if badly written) radical academic response to the overfocus of those writings on senior business executives with power and authority.  

- People Power – the literature of what we might call “Social change” is diverse and developing fast as the sense of crisis develops. It includes such fields as self-help, community enterprise and social movements and, for me, offers the best written and least self-serving material. Ronald Douthwaite’s Short Circuit – strengthening local economies for security in an unstable world (2003) is still one of the best arguments for social enterprise.  Tarrow’s Power in Movement: Social Movements and Contentious Politics is a good summary of the last group. International Charities (such as Oxfam) also make an important contribution to thinking….  

- State Reform – it’s amazing to realise that Public Sector Reform (PSR) is only about 25 years old….the writings come almost exclusively from academics and consultants and either ape that of change management; or of the deconstructionists of CMS. Increasingly the literature on “change” has been coming from state bodies (national and international) such as The World Bank, OECD, Asian Development Bank, ODI etc and is addressed to senior officials, academics (and journalists?)…

- The White Heat of Technology – everyone’s great hope in the face of the environmental and financial disasters (which people have eventually understood) now face the world….We are overwhelmed by the books which all sorts of people have been pouring out in the past decade giving us the stories of the technological, economic and social forces which produced (and change) the world in which we now live.    

Coincidentally, the first thing I found in this morning’s surfing was a presentation by Chris Martenson’s about his Crash course – a full version of which can be accessed here. That single hour’s viewing told me more than I had learned in the several hours it took me last week to read Naomi Klein’s This Changes Everything.

The presentation nicely complemented last week’s reading of Frederic Laloux’s Reinventing Organisations - a book which has apparently been making waves in Europe. His basic argument is that the wave of the future is joint-ownership and his book celebrates those companies (some quite large) which have adopted that principle and identifies some of the preconditions, systems and procedures which seem to account for its success.

When will they ever learn?

“Change” is one of these words 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 embodied in a famous series of “What’s wrong with Britain” books published by the Penguin Press) 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 theme in my life when, in 1968, I found myself representing the east end of a shipbuilding town. I 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” (1971). 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”…..

In 1975 I got the chance to shape the key strategy of Europe’s largest regional authority and to manage that change strategy for the next 15 years……  From 1990 I took my “mission” of institutional change to first central Europe and then (for 7 years) to Central Asia……

In 1999 I reflected on the lessons of my work (and reading) in a 200 page book In Transit – notes on good governance which contains from page 145 my (fairly rough) notes on the literature on “management of change” I had been reading in the 90s… Then followed a decade of intensive experience and critical reflection set out in the long 2011 paper The Long Game – not the log-frame – which reflects the stage I had reached in my thinking about how to achieve institutional change “against the odds”……

These were the memories stirred by a draft book entitled How Change Happens by Duncan Green – well known development adviser and blogger – which I downloaded yesterday and read, along with a shorter 2007 paper with the same title by R Kzarnic (which is actually a very concise and comprehensive review of the relevant literature)

It has raised yet again the question which has been nagging me recently – “when will we ever learn?” - or better perhaps “what” has been learned from all this exhortation to “change” or "develop capacities"?

For 50 years the rhetoric has been “improvement”, “reform”….“change for the better”…..we have ridiculed those who wanted to "maintain" or “conserve”……

But perhaps it's time to pause and ask some questions about the agenda of those who have preached change – at least in the public sector???

My own speciality has been the process of change – but it is the substance of most of the changes which is now being so seriously and widely questioned in Britain and Europe. Particularly the increased role of management and of private companies…..

We used to think it was advertising that made us such a dissatisfied people – constantly wanting “better” and “newer”….but it is also our political class which has helped create this dissatisfaction with public services and the demand for “better”….  

I've always believed in what I called the "pincer" movement of change - that improving people's lives required both "bottom-up" social movement and "top-down" support from "caring dissidents" within the system....Sadly the programmes which funded me after 1990 rarely gave me the opportunity to work this strategy........... 

The title of the post is a line from Pete Seeger's famous protest song - "Where Have all the Flowers Gone?" and the photo of that great folk-singer who died last year.....

Confession Time

Apologies to my loyal readers for my (abnormally) long silence of the past month…I made the mistake of collecting and reflecting on this year’s posts with a view to writing a proper introduction and conclusion to the 2015 volume which is due shortly. 
I got as far as a draft Preface – but the harder I thought about the posts and how the issues they raised might be pulled together in a coherent conclusion, the more depressed I became about the impossible task I had set myself. To pretend that one person has anything original to add to the thousands of scribblers whose writings so learnedly analyse the world’s ills……..!!  

It was Duncan Green’s blog which brought me back to earth – in a post about the limited use academics make of social media - by reminding me that - 

a blog is a ‘web log’, i.e. an online diary. 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.

In the past 18 months I’ve taken to raiding my posts in order to compose what are now ten E-books. I have to confess, however, that none of them attempted an overview.....  

Green is spot on about the help a blog like mine offers in finding old material...you just type in the keyword and the relevant post with its quotes and hyperlinks generally appear immediately – a record of your brain activity that particular morning. I also have a file of more than 150 pages (for each year) with raw text and several thousand hyperlinks which didn’t make it to the blog……an amazing archive of months of brain activity which, of course, needs a bit more time to access……  

The problem, of course, is when your brain switches off – as mine seems to have in the past couple of months!! Only 3-4 books have engaged my interest – eg Theodor Zeldin’s The Hidden Pleasures of Life; and, more recently, Naomi Klein’s This Changes Everything – a writer, I must confess, whose celebrity status had until now discouraged me from reading her stuff… This review explains why her new book is so well worth reading. But I have not been encouraged to excerpt either of these books….. nor to comment on the surprising victory of an old leftist in Labour’s leadership contest. Somehow I have lost my capacity to believe in the possibility of “change for the better”…..

I have, in the past decade, become increasingly sceptical of the writings in my own professional field about the possibilities of “reform” efforts actually improving public affairs and services for the better - but I had still been a bit shocked this year by the pessimistic tone of some of the post-mortems which key political science figures have been delivering on their retirements after some 40 years of analysis and exhortations…..

If that’s how the key figures feel about their work, what hope is there for the rest of us?

I hope shortly to upload an early version of the 2015 E-book and share some of my preliminary thoughts about the task I set myself…… 

The photo is one of series I have of marvellous Uzbek terra cotta figures which I acquired in Tashkent in the 3 years I spent there from 1999

The World Of Yesterday

A month ago I wrote about the art of the memoir ….listing some of the more memorable examples for me of that genre of writing. In the past fortnight a book has been keeping me company which must rate as one of the greatest of the 20^th century – Stefan Zweig’s The World of Yesterday which was first published in 1942 after his suicide the previous year but then languished for decades before being reissued recently as part of a revival of his work. Zweig’s memoir is less an autobiography than an intensely perceptive historical account of fin-de siècle Europe-up to the start of the Second World War. It may also be the longest suicide note in history.

Most of the (long) reviews have been ecstatic – with the exception of an exceedingly intemperate one in the London Review of Books from Michael Hoffman.

This review will hopefully whet the appetite

In the Introduction to his book Stefan Zweig rightly says that no generation in recent times had undergone such a series of cataclysms, each breaking bridges with an earlier period, as had his own. He had lived not only in one world of yesterday, but in several, and it is these worlds he sets out to describe.
He was born, a Jew, in 1881 into a cosmopolitan and tolerant Vienna and into a world of utter political and economic security, confident in steady progress in society and in science. It knew the douceur de vivre (except that unmarried young men and especially young women led a sexual life which could find an outlet only in prostitution), and where culture - no longer under the patronage of the Court, but under that of the Jewish bourgeoisie - was more honoured throughout society than was wealth.

The culture of the older generation was challenged by the avant-garde, with which Zweig and his fellow-students, even while still schoolboys in a stultifying educational system, were knowledgeably, passionately and actively engaged. Hugo von Hoffmansthal and Rilke were their lodestars. The universities were little better: Zweig was only a nominal student at the universities of Vienna and Berlin: his real intellectual life lay elsewhere.
 Already at the age of 19 he had the first of several articles accepted for the feuilleton section of the prestigious Neue Freie Presse in Vienna (of whose editor, Theodore Herzl, he gives a wonderful account). In Berlin he was looking for (and found) a wider circle - socially and intellectually - than in the somewhat inbred bourgeois and mainly Jewish milieu in which he had moved in Vienna. He drank in influences of every kind, from the sophisticated to the louche, exposing himself to `real life' as opposed to the purely literal and to some extent derivative life he had led so far.

In his travels in Belgium and his beloved Paris, he sought out the great artists and poets of his time. His descriptions of them - their physical appearance, their character and their psychology - are always masterful. His worshipful admiration of their work and of their personalities extends to reverence for the manuscripts or other memorabilia which he collected all his life. Though an Austrian, he identified himself first and foremost as a European.

The pivotal chapter, entitled “Brightness and Shadows over Europe”, describes the first decade of the 20th century: what a wonderfully optimistic, vigorous, progressive, prosperous, and confidence-inspiring decade that was, and yet how that very energy was used in greedy competition, how states who had plenty wanted yet more and clashed with others who wanted the same, so that in the end that very vigour brought about the cataclysm of the First World War.

Written with tremendous verve, these few pages surpass many an analysis of the causes of that disaster. And he observed with horror how overnight not only the masses but his so sophisticated and sensitive intellectual friends were swept along by the hysterical and bombastic enthusiasm for war. The sole exceptions among his friends were the Austrian Rilke and the Frenchman Romain Rolland. Only when Zweig visited Switzerland did he meet other opponents of the war who, like Rolland, had moved there because they could not bear or dare to live in their own countries. (Not all of these, of course, were lovers of peace: they included communists who would unleash their own slaughter in the coming years.)

He then describes the immediate post-war years: the terrifying inflation in Austria, which however seemed moderate when compared by the even more horrific inflation which followed in Germany; the collapse of and contempt for all pre-war cultural and social norms and forms, especially among the young.
These four or five terrible years then gave way to a decade of relative normality. It was then that Zweig's fame reached its apogee and he became the world's most widely-translated living author. He has some fascinating pages analyzing what might be the cause of this success which he found both intoxicating and disturbing because - so he says - he had ever been beset by self-doubt, by a desire to avoid personal publicity and to feel under obligation to nobody.

He presents some wonderful vignettes relating to that decade: of a visit to the Soviet Union in 1928 in which he is overwhelmed by the naive warmth of the people and only just made aware that he was being manipulated; his encounters with Gorky and with Croce; or of how Salzburg, the town he had made his home, had become, through its Festivals which began in 1920, a place of cultural pilgrimage from all over the world which brought to his home the most famous literary and artistic figures.

When the Nazis came to power in Germany, they burnt and banned all his works, eventually, after tortuous discussions involving Hitler himself, forbidding their revered composer Richard Strauss (of whom Zweig again gives a superb pen-portrait) to stage his opera `Die schweigsame Frau' because its libretto had been written by Zweig. The pressure of the Nazis on Austria became ever greater, and in 1934 Zweig left, initially for England (later for Brazil). In helpless despair he saw from afar more clearly than his friends in Austria that his homeland was doomed. And when Austria fell to the Nazis and he lost his passport, he became a refugee, subject to constant bureaucratic form-filling.

There is an eloquent lament for the world before the first world war when one was free to travel the world without a passport, and free from so many of the humiliating restrictions and regulations which now control innumerable aspects of our lives. The man, who as a cosmopolitan had felt at home everywhere, as a refugee now felt anchored nowhere. Tortured by the collapse of civilization in Europe, demeaned, deprived and unconfident, he poured out this masterpiece. He sent it off to a Swedish publisher in 1942, and took his life on the following day.

Some excerpts (from the later chapters) can be accessed here and a quite excellent long review here

Fatalism - democracy's default position?

I have become a sucker in recent years for “intellectual histories” – what you might call “stories about stories” - or trying to identify the common strands in how we try to make sense of “what happens”. I can’t quite remember why I decided to order David Runciman’s The Confidence Trap – a history of democracy in crisis from World War I to the Present (2013) – perhaps because he is such an elegant reviewer for London Review of Books - but I had not expected it to bring old debates to life with such verve. After the initial surprise with the “executive” style of the sparse narrative (with lots of binary contrasts) I quickly got hooked on his counterintuitive approach to the seven turning points he examines 

- 1918, when democracy was confronted with the catastrophic consequences of an unanticipated war;
- 1933, when it had to cope with a global slump
- 1947, when Europe was being divided and the cold war was developing in the aftermath of World War II;
- the Cuban missile crisis in 1962;
- oil shock and stagflation in 1974;
 - short-lived triumphalism in 1989;
- the financial crisis of 2008.

The book’s beginning - with an analysis of Alexis de Tocqueville’s classic work “Democracy in America”, the first volume of which was published in 1835 (Tocqueville had travelled to America from France in 1831) – sets the tone for the various intellectual dialogues Runciman sets up in the book 

 “The person who first noticed the distinctive character of democratic hubris—how it is consistent with the dynamism of democratic societies, how democratic adaptability goes along with democratic drift—was Tocqueville.” Neither an optimist nor a pessimist, Tocqueville “did not share either the concerns of the traditional critics of democracy or the hopes of its modern champions.” Runciman does not share these concerns or hopes either, and yet with Tocqueville he seems convinced that the rise of democracy is the great political fact of modern times.

His basic argument is that “democratic regimes” deal with challenges better but that this very success has probably sown the seeds of future failure. Modern democracy seems, he argues, to develop a “fatalism” which finds expression in two very different types of behaviour - first that of “resignation” (“this too will pass”); and, second, that of “recklessness” – when some sort of strong action seems called for…

I made de Tocqueville’s journey 156 years later (from Scotland) – courtesy of the German Marshall Foundation – to explore (on a 6 week fellowship) how local communities (eg in the Pittsburgh area) were dealing with the effects of the closure of their steel mills. I was lucky enough to be “embedded” in the various municipal organisations with interests in community enterprise (including a brief period in the Chicago mayor’s office at the height of one of their schools’ crises) and soon found myself overwhelmed by the role of charitable Foundations in this sort of work. Like de Tocqueville, I could feel the energy in the air.... 
I came as a sceptic but identified no fewer than nine features of their local development process as "worthy of study and replication" 

- more pluralistic sources of Local Funding (the scale of corporate and tax-free grants to Foundations)

- networking of people from the private and public sectors (eg Community Leadership scheme)

- scanning for strategic work : the active, participative role played by the private sector in the process of setting the regional agenda in places like Chicago was impressive

- coaching : the way community economic development skills were encouraged

- marketing : of voluntary organisations

- affirming : affirmative action in Chicago Council was handled very systematically in areas such as hiring and sub-contracting

- negotiating : the flexibility of the planning system allowed local councils to strike deals with developers to the direct advantage of poorer areas.

- persevering : the realism about timescale of change

- parcelling into manageable units of action: the British mentality seemed to prefer administrative neatness to permit a "coordinated" approach. American "messiness" seemed to produce more dynamism.

How Sofia opened Robert Conquest's Eyes

Robert Conquest – who died last month at the age of 98 – was the best known British investigator in the post-war period of the true scale of the communist tyranny.  During the 1960s he edited eight volumes of work including “Common Sense About Russia” (1960), “The Soviet Deportation of Nationalities” (1960) and “Power and Policy in the USSR” (1961). His other early works on the Soviet Union included “Courage of Genius: The Pasternak Affair” (1961) and “Russia After Khrushchev” (1965) published in the United States republished as The Contemporary Soviet Union Series by Frederick Praeger, whose U.S. company published, in addition to works by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Milovan Đilas and a number of books on communism.

Many of us saw him overly fixated on Soviet atrocities - but the opening of soviet records after 1990 proved him correct. 

I learned several new things from the obituaries and tributes of recent weeks. First that he was a poet and close friend of Kingsley Amis – with a strong line in doggerel.  

But the most important insight was that his revulsion against Soviet tyranny stemmed from his personally witnessing the Communist takeover of Bulgaria in 1944 – an event which I have written about here. In 1944, Conquest was posted to Bulgaria as a liaison officer to the Bulgarian forces fighting under Soviet command, attached to the Third Ukrainian Front, and then to the Allied Control Commission. There, he met Tatiana Mihailova, who later became his second wife. At the end of the war, he joined the Foreign Office, returning to the British Legation in Sofia. Witnessing first-hand the communist takeover in Bulgaria, he became completely disillusioned with communist ideas. He left Bulgaria in 1948, helping Tatiana escape the new regime. Back in London, he divorced his first wife and married Tatiana.

The third fascinating fact is that, on the war’s end, he actually joined the Labour Party’s International Bureau – working therefore with Dennis Healey (who sadly died about 10 days after I drafted this - at the ripe old age of 98). Conquest then joined the Foreign Office's Information Research Department (IRD), a unit created by the Labour government to "collect and summarize reliable information about Soviet and communist misdoings, to disseminate it to friendly journalists, politicians, and trade unionists, and to support, financially and otherwise, anticommunist publications."

You can read more about his life here. He is an obvious candidate for the next entry in the blog Britain is no country for old men

Carbon Democracy

Those of us who try to keep up with things have piles of books on the key subjects of the day - "global warming", "end of oil", "neoliberalism" or "Islamic extremism". The books in each of these categories all have their particular cast of characters; storyline; prescriptions; and prejudices. But, like ships that pass in the night, they steer clear of (and rarely reference) one another. 

I’ve just finished a rare book which aims to connect the dots between these categories – it’s Carbon Democracy – political power in the age of oil (2013) and a stunning bit of work whose provocative historical insights turn upside down many of our preconceptions 

The use of coal and oil in the context of industrialization has always been about who has the power to profit from the surplus these energy forms produce, but until now, no one has pulled the various historical details together into a historical narrative laying bare the fascinating power dynamics behind the rise of Western political systems and their relationship with energy. Carbon Democracy is an examination of our civilization’s 400 hundred year use of carbon-based energy fueling sources, and the political systems that grew up intertwined with them. Rather than presenting energy and democracy as separate things, like a battery and a device, Mitchell discusses the political architecture of the Western world and the developing world as inherently tied to fuelling sources.

The thesis is that elites have always sought to maximize not the amount of energy they could extract and use, but the profit stream from those energy sources. They struggled to ensure they would be able to burn carbon and profit, without having to rely on the people who extract and burned it for them. Carbon-based fuels thus cannot be understood except in the context of labour, imperialism and democracy. 

This book is a response to David Yergen’s The Prize: The Epic Question for Oil, Money, and Power, a classic story of hardy entrepreneurs taking huge risks to find oil in the most remote places. Yergen’s narrative centers on oil scarcity, and its contributions to economic growth in a capitalist framework. Oil is, to Yergen, the prize, solving the key problem of how to supply enough energy for a modern consumer society with a flexible and inexpensive fuel source. 

In Carbon Democracy, Mitchell has a counterintuitive take on oil, one that after a while, makes much more sense than Yergen’s. Mitchell points out that the problem of oil has never, until recently, been that it is a scarce commodity, but that it is a surplus commodity. We had too much of it. And the central problem that this created was now how to find more of it, but how to ensure that oil cartels profiting from high oil prices could make sure that very few new oil finds, especially from the massive fields in the Middle East, came online.

Far from a hardy band of entrepreneurs searching for more oil, the story of oil is one of parasitic cartels manipulating governments and inventing concepts like mandates, self-determination, and national security to ensure they could retain high profits selling a widely available commodity. But Mitchell takes the story much deeper than Yergen did, because Yergen’s book is fundamentally a fairy tale that skirts over questions of labor and colonialism. 

Mitchell goes back before the widespread use of oil, to the industrialization of England and England’s use of carbon-based fuels, like forests, peat, and coal. Industrialization demanded two seemingly contradictory factors – huge new tracts of land to grow industrial raw materials like cotton and high energy food crops like sugar, and far more centralized urban centres for manufacturing. What happened, of course, is that England simply acquired colonies with large land tracts overseas, using slave labour to harvest necessary commodities, while becoming an urban society in its core areas. Eventually, England began using coal to fuel its economy, leading to substantial economic growth and imperial strength.

Coal, though, presented a challenge to the governing elites, since the characteristics of coal, with its labour intensive extraction methods, were quite vulnerable to strikes. Coal was hard to transport, and miners operated underground in a collaborative manner. Once on the surface, coal had to be moved by fixed networks of trains. There were multiple bottlenecks here, and in the late 19th century, for the first time, the energy system of the industrialized world was reliant on workers who could withhold their labour and block a key resource. This translated directly into political power. 

As Mitchell put it, “Coal miners played a leading role in contesting work regimes and the private powers of employers in the labour activism and political mobilisation of the 1880s and onward. Between 1881 and 1905, coal miners in the United States went on strike at a rate of about three times the average for workers in all major industries, and at double the rate of the next-highest industry, tobacco manufacturing.” The coal industry was the key radicalizing force in bringing democracy to the Western world…….

Mitchell is a British born political scientist and student of the Arab world. He is a professor of Middle Eastern Studies at Columbia University having previously been Professor of Politics at New York University. When he arrived in the United States in 1977 to start a Ph.D. in Politics at Princeton, he was 

"surprised to discover that the Politics Department at Princeton was teaching the same old positivism. I was interested in the politics of the Arab world, having traveled there several times, so I evaded political science by taking courses in Middle Eastern history and Arabic language and spent three of the next six years studying and researching in Cairo”. 

He’s also the author of Rule of Experts – Egypt, technopolitics, modernity (2002) and it’s this background which helps give his study of “Carbon Democracy” such great originality…The book has an amazing historical sweep but gives us chapter and verse on aspects of the various turning points of the developments of coal and oil in Britain and America which tend to remain hidden from view in most accounts….. And what a wonderful title - "carbon democracy", with all its connotations of institutional aping...The excerpts are from the long review the blogsite “Naked Capitalism” gave the book in 2012 

Flowing through the narrative is the question of imperialism and neo-imperialism. A variety of ideological mechanisms, such as the self-determination ostensibly preached by Woodrow Wilson, were in fact ways for Western oil consuming states to control and slow the flow of oil from poorer but oil rich countries.
Mitchell shows how Palestinian strikes at oil installations in the late 1930s led Britain to support a Jewish state in the area, and how American mining engineers helped craft the apartheid regime in South Africa.

 At the same time, aggressive left-wing parties in the British parliament sought to combat imperialism, because they understood that imperialism abroad was meant to break the power of British labor – in particular coal mining – at home. Mitchell pays particular attention to the negotiations of the Treaty of Versailles and the period of negotiations after World War II to set up an international management framework. The League of Nations, he writes, “was to be an economic mechanism to replace, not war between states, but its taproot – the conflict over material resources.”

In addition to what would become the World Bank and IMF, Keynes wanted to establish an international body to manage commodities, including and especially oil. While no institution was ever set up to do this, a framework of national security and “the Cold War” managed to keep Middle Eastern and Russian offline for a long period of time. In addition, the oil companies used public relations to encourage a high oil consumption lifestyle in the United States, so as to keep the price of oil as high as possible. In Europe, Mitchell encourages a revised view of the Marshall plan, as a joint European and American elite plan to break European labor power. It’s a particularly interesting way to interpret the rise of the European Union, one deeply at odds with thinkers like George Soros who see the EU as a success of far sighted visionaries who sought to to build an “open society”.

Mitchell cites American intervention in post-WWII European economic and political arrangements as evidence. Three years later, after rapid inflation caused real wages to collapse, coal miners joined a series of strikes demanding that the government increase pay levels or extend food rations… Rather than yield to these claims, France and other European governments turned to the United States. Keen to promote their new corporate management model abroad (and to have Washington subsidise their exports), American industrialists used a fear of the popularity of Communist parties in Western Europe to win support for postwar aid to Europe. ‘The Communists are rendering us a great service’, commented the future French prime minister Pierre Mendès-France. ‘Because we have a “Communist danger” the Americans are making a tremendous effort to help us….

The European Coal and Steel Community, established as a first step towards the political union of Europe, reduced competition in the coal industry and supported the mechanisation of production, with funds provided to alleviate the effects of the resulting pit closures and unemployment. The United States helped finance the programme, which reduced the ability of coal miners to carry out effective strikes by rapidly reducing their numbers and facilitating the supply of coal across national borders. The third element was the most extensive. The US funded initiatives to convert Europe’s energy system from one based largely on coal to one increasingly dependent on oil.

The curious thing, however, for a book with “democracy” in its title, written by a political scientist and with a sub-title which includes the phrase “political power” is how little exploration we get of the implications of the end of oil for our so-called democracy. The book is very strong on the methods used to “manufacture” the “consensus” of the ruled (curiously without mentioned Chomsky!!)