Whatever happened to good governance and anti-corruption?

Romania’s Presidency of the Council of the EU has come – and almost gone…It has not been the disaster many people predicted not least the President of the country, one Klaus Johannis who takes himself very seriously but has great difficulties conveying much sense and has done the country no favours with his all too predictable carping from the sidelines of a so-called socialist government.

The Romanian Presidential system is modelled on the French and found an effective (if rather eccentric) performer in Traian Basescu who managed to ride out some serious challenges to his legitimacy between 2004-2014 and to embed a prosecution system which has, however, become a bit of a Frankenstein. Indeed, its anti-corruption Agency (DNA) was exposed a couple of years ago as being in cahoots with the security system; being politically-motivated in its selection of those to prosecute; and using massive and illegal wiretaps.

Its Head Laura Kovesi was duly removed from office in July 2018 by the Justice Minister (an act duly approved by the Constitutional Court) and is now the subject of criminal charges.

Half-way through Romania’s 6-month term of the Presidency of the Council of the EU, the country therefore found itself in the invidious situation of its ex- Prosecutor Kovesi (who had received the support of the European Parliament for the new post of European Prosecutor) being banned for 60 days from travelling abroad.  

But President Klaus Johannis, sadly, seems as much a criminal as the leader of the Social Democratic party Liviu Dragnea (barred from holding office due to a prior conviction for “electoral fraud”) who has just been jailed for 3 years – on an Al Capone type charge…. Johannis and his wife gained hundreds of thousands of euros from renting property which, a court judged in 2015, had been gained by them fraudulently. The full details are here

Things are never simple in Romania and the sad reality, as the country approaches the 30^th anniversary of its release from communism is that very little has changed for the better and – as I explained in a series of posts last year – most serious people have now given up hope of any possibility of positive change.

I know that pessimism hangs heavily in the air these days throughout Europe ….most societies are suffering from one malaise or another……but it is the countries who broke free 30 years ago who are most at risk these days since few of their institutions are yet working in an equitable manner     

Alina Mungiu-Pippidi is one of the few people who has been trying to raise the profile of this issue - a prolific and high profile Romanian academic/social activist (with a base for the past few years in the Hertie School of Government in Berlin) who has been exploring Romanian political culture and the wider issue of corruption for the past 2 decades. In 2006 she contributed a chapter on “Fatalistic political cultures” to a book on Democracy and Political Culture in East Europe. In this she argued (a) that it was too easy for people (not least the political elite themselves!) to use the writings of Samuel Huntington to write Balkan countries off; and (b) that we really did need to look more closely at what various surveys (such as The World Values Survey) showed before jumping to conclusions….In 2007 she gave us even more insights into the Romanian culture with a fascinating and learned article - Hijacked modernisation - Romanian political culture in the 20th century 

Chasing Moby Dick across every sea and ocean – contextual choices in fighting corruption (NORAD 2011) is not the best of her writing – a bit scrappy to put it mildly - but it asks the right questions. In particular – how many countries have actually managed to shake off a corrupt system and build a credible system of rule of law? And how did they manage that feat? 
That the answer is remarkably few - and that it took many generations - should make us all pause 

A decade ago the issues of “good governance” and “anti-corruption” were all the rage for bodies such as the OECD and the World Bank - and academics. Now they look a bit sheepish if people use the phrases….Silver bullets have turned out to be duds…..But it is time to resurrect that debate...

Further Reading on Romania and institutional inertia

Academic articles/booklets on political culture and Romania

Romania Redivivus ;Alex Clapp (NLR 2017). One of the most incisive diagnoses

A Guide to Change and change management for Rule of Law practitioners (INPROL 2015) a well-written guide which assumes that a "rule of law" system can be crated within a generation!

The Quest for Good Governance – how societies develop control of corruption; Alina Mungiu-Pippidi (2015). One of the most up-to-date analyses which demonstrates the weakness of data-driven analysis. Difficult to see the wood for the trees....But some very sharp insights...

Hijacked modernisation - Romanian political culture in the 20^th century; Alina Mungiu-Pippidi (2007) marvellous case-study

Poor Policy-making and how to improve it in states with weak institutions; Sorin Ionitsa (CEU 2006) One of the most acute assessments

books

In Europe’s Shadow – two cold wars and a thirty-year journey through Romania and beyond; Robert Kaplan (2016) - a fascinating book by a geopoliticist which has an element of the “Common Book” tradition about it with its breadth of reading

A Concise History of Romania; Keith Hitchins (2014) Very readable..

Mapping Romania - notes on an unfinished journey; Ronald Young (2019) just updated with posts from the last couple of years which get more and more fatalistic

Romania and the European Union – how the weak vanquished the strong; Tom Gallagher (2009) great narrative
Theft of a Nation – Romania since Communism; Tom Gallagher (2005) powerful critique
Romania – borderland of Europe; Lucian Boia (2001) Very readable and well translated

The geography of thinking

Most of the time we imagine we are unique individuals – very occasionally we have a sense that we are but a grain of sand in an endless desert.

An archetypal figure in these most modern of modern times is the character who flits between continents, universities, policy institutes, government and business consultancies and on whom it is difficult to pin any label except that of “technocrat”.

I have, these past 2 days, been absorbed by a book whose title The Dawn of Euroasia – on the trail of the new world order (2018) intrigued me sufficiently to persuade me to fork out 10 euros without too rigorously subjecting its content to the tests I recommend for non-fiction books. Its author Bruno Macaes was unknown to me but seems to be one of the slippery new breed of geographical, linguistic and functional commuters.

A self-styled “adventurer”, Maçães was a Professor 2006/07 at the University of Yonsei in the Republic of Korea, where he taught International Political Economy; then worked at the American Enterprise Institute in 2008. From 2008 to 2011, Maçães helped launch a new international university in Europe, the European College of Liberal Arts in Berlin.

Between 2011-2013 he was a policy adviser in the Portuguese PM office whose political connections allowed him, for a couple of years, to be Secretary of State for European Affairs which he left in late 2015. He has held positions at the Carnegie and right-wing Hudson Institutes; and is currently a hedge-fund adviser with Flint Global

I could see that the text covered aspects of China and the Central Asian countries in which I had spent almost a decade of my life - and that acknowledgements were duly made to the geopolitics writer par excellence  Robert Kaplan – although there was no reading list.

I am now on the final chapter and have to say that this is an extremely well-read 45 year old (with the breadth including a range of Russian novels he’s able to build seamlessly into the text)- even if this interview does reveal a certain slickness

Particularly resonant at this time was a section covering the 2015 immigration crisis which was resolved by a formula based on algorithms which weighed for population size, GNP (40% apiece), average number of asylum applicants per million inhabitants in 2010-2014; and the unemployment rate (10% apiece). As he was reading the account of the relevant meeting in his office, he suddenly had the realization that 

“the EU isn’t meant to take political decisions. What it tries to do is develop a system of rules to be applied more or less autonomously to a highly complex political and social reality” (p228)

I am surprised, however, that Macaes does not make more of the cultural insights which occur particularly in his “Chinese Dreams” chapter (pages 137-147). His spell in South Korea will have allowed him to become familiar with the literature on the culture of geography - whose principal exponents are de Hofstede, Trompenaars and Inglehart

Richard Lewis’s When Cultures Clash (1996) is my favourite go-to reference whenever the discussion turns to questions of cultural difference – as is Richard Nisbett’s Geography of Thought (2003) who argues that-

East Asians and Westerners perceive the world and think about it in very different ways. Westerners are inclined to attend to some focal object, analyzing its attributes and categorizing it in an effort to find out what rules govern its behavior. Rules used include formal logic. Causal attributions tend to focus exclusively on the object and are therefore often mistaken.

East Asians are more likely to attend to a broad perceptual and conceptual field, noticing relationships and changes and grouping objects based on family resemblance rather than category membership. Causal attributions emphasize the context. Social factors are likely to be important in directing attention. East Asians live in complex social networks with prescribed role relations. Attention to context is important to effective functioning.
More independent Westerners live in less constraining social worlds and have the luxury of attending to the object and their goals with respect to it. The physical ‘‘affordances’’ of the environment may also influence perception.

Most of the writing on the geography of thought hesitates at this stage and seems unwilling to explore the implications of such a startling discovery. The niceties of cultural behaviour on display at global interactions are a safer topic – forming an integral part of most Business School courses. 

But the reviews of The Geography of Thought clearly suggest that all of us need to be thinking much more about the way we all take decisions – whether as individuals, organisations or countries – in full recognition that there are, legitimately, various styles appropriate to particular contexts….…

Further Reading

This is a more eclectic list than usual not just because Macaes is well-read but also for the thoughts his text gives rise to….

Beyond Liberal Democracy – political thinking in an east Asian context; Daniel Bell (2006) is a powerful early apologia for the system of party control in China written by a Canadian political scientist who has chosen since 2000 or so to live in China

The Art of Thinking; Allen Harrison and Robert Bramson (1984) The book which introduced me to the idea that there are, legitimately, different styles of thinking

Decisive – how to make better choices in life and work; C and D Heath (2013). An example of the huge literature now available on decision-making…

Cultures and organization – software of the mind; G de Hofstede (1991) One of the first to explore the cultural aspects of organisations and societies

When Cultures Collide – Richard Lewis (1996) – the full text of the easiest book on the subject

Riding the Waves of Culture; Frans Trompenaars (1996). Another Dutchman rides the waves…

The geography of thought; Richard Nesbitt (2003) – which pushed the ideas further
The Spirit of Russia; Thomas Masyrk (1913 German; 1919 English). An amazing book written before the First World War by the guy who subsequently became President of Czechoslovakia

Hacks? Critics? Writers?What's in a Name?

I’ve been spending a fair amount of time these past few weeks going over the year’s posts (60) to try to give them a little bit more “shape” ie coherence. It was probably this post back in June which planted the idea of the need for some editing of my posts. For whatever reason, there does seem to have been more of a pattern to my writing this year..  The interest in organisational reform didn’t entirely peter out – but morphed into a larger concern about systems of power and the State..

I will, in a few days, be uploading this year’s collection of posts which also shows that an important thread running through the year has been the need for writing which – as one post put it - 

jolts me – not for its own sake but to help first identify minds which look at the world in original ways but which also understand that clear language is an essential tool for such originality…Recently deceased essayist Tom Wolfe was a favourite of mine ever since I first read his Mau Mauing the flak catchers in 1970 but the “creative writing” courses which have contaminated journalism in the past few decades have made me suspicious of even good journalists these days. James Meek remains an exception for his ability to reduce economic complexities to 5 or 10 thousand word essays – ditto Jonathan Meades for his forensic analyses of cultural issues.

But it was Arthur Koestler who first stunned me (in my late teens) with memorable writing – hardly surprising given his amazing background. Only Victor Serge could rival the enormity of the events which shaped him. How can those who have known only a quiet bourgeois English life possibly give us insights into other worlds? And yet a few writers manage to do it.

But somehow, academic specialists are rarely able to produce prose which grips…Is it the unrealistic restriction of the scope of their inquiries vision which causes the deadness of their prose – or perhaps the ultra security of their institutional base??

It’s this question which led me to offer this matrix of good journalistic writers – dividing them according to their focus on people, ideas, events and places. This made me realise, in turn, the fine line there is between such categories as journalist, novelist and travel writer. Or perhaps the distinction is, more properly, that between generalists and specialists – with the latter including not only travel writers but those who focus on books, films, drama and art (designated "critics") and sports (of each variety – including politics).  And the former covering essentially those we refer to, derogatively, as “hacks” – since what they do is to hack out “news” from the public relations handouts they receive

I accept that the focus of my table on the former type of writer is as a result somewhat elitist....

I wanted to include examples from countries beyond the UK and managed 20 – whose nationalities are clearly designated in the table. I’ve tried googling (in French and in German) to try to get a sense of who might be the equivalent European journalists but the google curse of neophilia means that only references to younger names are given….

Good “Journalistic” writers – by focus, base and nationality

Source of income	People	Ideas	Events	Places	Mixed genres
freelance	Masha Gessen (RU) Biographers	Peter Watson Naomi Klein (Can)	Victor Serge (Be) Kenneth Roy	John Ardagh Dervla Murphy Jan Morris Neal Ascherson Philip Marsden Giles Milton	George Orwell Hans Magnus Enzensberger (Ger) Francis Wheen Arundati Roy (India) Joan Didion  US Tariq Ali (Pak/UK)
Academia	Biographers	Mark Greif USA Mark Lilla USA Perry Anderson USA	Historians Political scientists Economists	Geographers Anthropologists Sociologists	Raymond Aron (France) Michael Pollan USA
Journal newspaper television	Oriana Fallaci (It) Clive James	Francois Bondy (Sw) Claude Roy (Fr) Chris Hitchens Martin Jacques Paul Mason George Monbiot Duncan Campbell Owen Jones Adam Curtis	Arthur Koestler Vasily Grossman (Ru) Seb Haffner (Ger) Joseph Roth (Ger) Rudolf Augstein (Ger) Paul Foot Patrick Cockburn Simon Jenkins	Luigi Barzini (It) Andrew Sampson Svetlana Alexievich (Belarussia) Robert Kaplan (US) John Hooper John Pilger Robert Fisk Tobias Jones	Anthony Lane James Meek Andrew O Hagen
Think Tank		David Goodhart Susan George (US)

Romanian's National Day

This blog has celebrated Romania’s National Day before - but today is special since it is exactly 100 years ago today that various groups came together in Alba Iulia (which was previously the heart of Hungarian Transylvania) to celebrate the unification of that significant part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire (and part of Banat) not only with what was (since 1877) already an independent Romania but also with Bessarabia, Moldova and North Dobrodjea. In one fell swoop the landmass of the country – which opted for the Western Allies only in 1916 - was tripled.

It’s therefore a suitable day to celebrate good writing about Romania. Let me start with an author, Robert Kaplan, who has established a nice little niche for himself as a traveller with a strong line in geo-politics – with The Revenge of History (2013) being its epitome.

I have just finished rereading his “In Europe’s Shadow” (2016) which is most decidedly not a travelogue but that rare and worthwhile endeavour – an attempt to penetrate a country’s soul borne of his forays over a period of 30 years after his first (and unusual) first port of call in 1981– selected simply because, for someone wanting to be a foreign journalist, it offered the distinction of having no competitors…

It’s a very individual if not poetic book which in which the country’s past casts the main shadow (despite the title) but one which is dealt with deftly – often through conversations with characters many of whom are long dead. Americans are not well known for their linguistic skills and I sense that Kaplan relied on translated texts for his early grasp of Romanian history – so Mircea Eliade’s little history of the country (written when he was an attache in Portugal with the Iron Guard regime) was an early companion for Kaplan. But also English writers such as Stephen Runciman and Lord Kinross (on the influence of the Ottoman empire), Macartney (Austro-Hungarian empire) and particularly John Julius Norwich (Byzantium) Since 1990 he has been able to access the histories of Vlad Georgescu, Lucian Boia, Keith Hitchens even Neagu Djuvara although his failure to mention Tom Gallagher's 2 books on the country proves the point I make below about his lack of interest in the contemporary scene.... 

Although he’s able to get access to Presidents (Iliescu and Basescu) and Prime Ministers (Ponta), it’s the long-term geopolitical threats represented by the borders, plains, armies and pipelines which interest him – and he is happiest when in the company of those who talk this language.

The comments of even a dilettante like Patapievici are preferable to any conversation about ordinary life – all we get on that score is a statement that “thanks to the influence of the EU, institutions are slowly becoming more transparent” (!!) 
For future editions of the book, I would recommend that he seeks out people such as Alina Mungiu-Pippidi and Sorin Ionitsa

Then there’s my own Mapping Romania - notes on an unfinished journey (2014). This is my own tribute to the country whose summers I have enjoyed since 2007 and which I have known intermittently since winter 1991. It's actually more of a resource book for English-language visitors who want to know something of the country's history and culture. Its 120 pages contain various a couple of thousand hyperlinks and annexes which give further detail on its history, literature (or rather English texts focusing on the country), art....even cinema...

And, in Bucharest’s French bookshop, I have just come across a nice set of little stories - “Chroniques de Roumanie”; Richard Edwards (2017)

Plus Ca Change,,,,plus c’est la meme chose???

European countries have experienced massive changes since the end of the war – and yet, I keep on wondering, .”to what extent do national characteristics actually change”. The interview with Dorel Sandor does not seem to have attracted much notice in the country but, for me, has crystallised the various impressions about Romania I’ve conveyed in the blog in recent years

Let me summarise his key points -

- 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 “mass” and “social” media dominating people’s minds

- So-called “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

My last 2 posts have argued that -

- in the early 90s everyone (particularly outside Romania) expected too much – although remember that Ralf Dahrendorf - unique in his experience as both a German and British politician and one of the first academics in the 50s to explore the nature of the social changes which took place in Germany in the first half of the 20^th century (Society and Democracy in Germany) - had warned in 1990 that real cultural change would take “two generations”. For middle class academics, this meant 50 years!

- Absolutely no preparations existed in 1989 for the possibility that communism might collapse and for the choices this would present for political, economic and legal systems …..Everyone had assumed that the change would be in the opposite direction. The only writings which could be drawn were those about the south American, Portugese and Spanish transition ….

- The EC stopped treating Romania as in need of “developmental assistance” in 1998/99. The PHARE programme was phased out - the focus shifted to training for EU membership and the implementation of the Acquis (using the TAIEX programme). Talk of differences in political culture was seen as politically incorrect – eastern countries simply had to learn the language and habits of the European social market and, hey-presto, things would magically change……

- 30 years on, the names of Bulgarian and Romanian institutions and processes may have changed but not the fundamental reality – with a corruption which is nothing less than systemic.

- The billions of Euros allocated to Romania since 2007 under the EC’s Structural Funds programmes have compounded the systemic and moral corruption which affects all sectors.

- The Cooperation and Verification Mechanism is, after 11 years, deeply resented – despite the increasingly clear evidence of the collusion between the Prosecution and the Secret services…..

The Italian and German examples

In 1958 Ed Banfield coined the phrase “amoral familism” to characterize southern Italy and its resistance to change. In 1993 Robert Putnam extended this critique with his Making Democracy Work – civic traditions in modern Italy – pointing out that, centuries later, cultural patterns in the south still profoundly affected modern institutions …. The Italian system since then has demonstrated little capacity for change. What appeared to be a new opening in the 1990s disappointed….the old systems simply resurfaced

Germany’s traditional power structure, on the other hand, was able to change after 1945… The Weimar Republic failed to break it – but simply gave a Nazi regime the opportunity to let loose a blood-letting from which the world has not yet recovered. Three forces were required to transform German society in 1945-50 - the trauma of defeat on all fronts; the imposition by the victors of completely new institutional, legal, social and economic systems; and the Realpolitik calculations of the Cold War

Romania, however, has been able to brush off the institutional challenge which had been posed by membership of both the EC and NATO (see). The occasional scandal can and does cause the downfall of a government - but nothing now seems able to disturb its systemic inertia.

Conclusion

It has given me no pleasure to draft this post. But I feel that too many people for too long have not spoken out….In 2 months Romania will take over the Presidency of the EU which will see the full panoply(a)y of mutual sycophancy at full throttle……making it even more difficult for dissenting voices to be heard…

Dorel Sandor 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. It’s how I started my own political journey in 1971 – with an annual conference in a shipbuilding town facing the decline of the trade on which it had depended for so long….But any venture would have to demonstrate that it can deal with the astonishing level of distrust of others shown by the fact that, 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)

For my money Social Trust is one of the fundamental elements of the soil in which democracy grows. From the start of the transition Romania was caught up in a global neo-liberalism tsunami which has been corroding that soil….

A Short Reading List on Romanian political culture

Articles

RGY posts

When will it ever change? (July 2017)

Can Outsiders ever understand what’s going on in Romania? (Jan 2017)

Impervious Power (Jan 2017)

A Divided Country – dangerous times (Feb 2017)

Are Nations really masters of their fates? (April 2017)
Is it people who change systems - or systems which change people? (July 2017)

Academic articles on political culture - and Romania

Romania Redivivus (2017)

A Guide to Change and change management for Rule of Law practitioners (2015)

Hijacked modernisation - Romanian political culture in the 20^th century; Alina Mungiu-Pippidi (2007)

Poor Policy-making and how to improve it in states with weak institutions; Sorin Ionitsa (CEU 2006)

“Fatalistic political cultures” Alina Mungiu-Pippidi 2006 (chapter in Democracy and Political Culture in East Europe in which she argued (a) that it was too easy for people (not least the political elite themselves!) to use the writings of Samuel Huntington to write off countries such as Romania; and (b) that we really did need to look more closely at what various surveys (such as The World Values Survey) showed before jumping to conclusions

books

In Europe’s Shadow – two cold wars and a thirty-year journey through Romania and beyond; Robert Kaplan (2016) - a fascinating book which has an element of the “Common Book” tradition about it with its breadth of reading

A Concise History of Romania; Keith Hitchins (2014) Very readable..

Mapping Romania - notes on an unfinished journey; Ronald Young (2014) See section 7.2 at page 31 and all the annexes for the political culture references

Romania and the European Union – how the weak vanquished the strong; Tom Gallagher (2009) great narrative

Romania – borderland of Europe; Lucian Boia (2001) Very readable and well translated