What’s Transitional Justice – when it’s at home?

I continue to think about the increasing divisiveness in our societies – and the apparently minimal efforts being made to repair the divisions. Or is this just a mirage – something created by a 24-hour media system which exults in scandals and bad news? Perhaps, under the surface, all is much better than we think. Perhaps the optimists like Stephen Pinker are right after all?

It is, of course, impossible to generalise – the world looks very different from a Chinese point of view. Each country needs its own assessment – ideally from a combination of internal and external sources. The UK, for example, perhaps suffers from a surfeit of such appraisals – of both sorts - starting with the prescient Suicide of a Nation edited by Arthur Koestler in 1963 which attracted Olympian disdain from none less than Philip Hobsbawm

After the Obama years, the USA has had, over the past 5 years, only its negative side portrayed - but two recent books offer the country some ideas for how it might rebuild. They are

- The Upswing – how American came together a century ago and how we can do it again by Robert Putnam (2020) – the country’s best-known sociologist and

       -  A Time to build – how recommitting to our institutions can revive the American dream; Yuval Levin (2020) which builds explicitly on an important but neglected book written in 2009.

For the moment, my interest is focused on Bulgaria and Romania – and how such countries might extricate themselves from the vicious circle of hopelessness into which their citizens seem to be locked.

Political leaders of these countries, of course, would not agree with that description – but any reading of the annual Eurobarometer poll of EU citizens is inevitably drawn to the conclusion that the political institutions of central and south-eastern Europe lack legitimacy and public trust. One of Romania’s foremost political analysts – Dorel Sandor – wrote in 2018 a powerful article in which he confessed that he had given up any hope for the country - with this reliable source giving evidence for the loss of trust in the country.

A recent book - Romania Confronts Its Communist Past: Democracy, Memory, and Moral Justice; by Vladimir Tismaneanu and Marius Stan (2018) – reminds us of what lies behind this. Just over a decade ago – after some 15 years of the country being in denial about its past - a maverick President set up a Commission to investigate the communist era. This is the book in which its chairman recounts the experience and impact of the Commission.

I asked a young Bulgarian friend who is a journalist with an interest in Romanian affairs about what efforts either country had made toward “conciliation” in their divided societies – and was, of course, then made immediately aware of the fragility of the words we use when he asked for an explanation of what I meant by the term. I was aware that it is normally used to reference family and minor commercial disputes but I had forgotten that a new field has arisen – of Transitional Justice – into which academics (both Eastern and Western) have been crowding in the past decade. This includes the field of property restitution, lustrace and memory

And I have the feeling that few Bulgarians or Romanians have been let loose with what I would call “mediating skills” of the sort practised by Adam Kahane of the last post

A Short Reading List on Romania

Key Articles on Romania

2020 Freedom House report on Romania; written by reputable Romanian experts

Romania Redivivus (2017) an excellent summary of the social and economic changes since 1989 

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

Hijacked modernisation - Romanian political culture in the 20th century; Alina Mungiu-Pippidi (2007) The country's finest analyst

Poor Policy-making and how to improve it in states with weak institutions; Sorin Ionitsa (CEU 2006) pity this hasn't been updated

“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

Europe's Burden - promoting good governance across. borders" Alina Mungiu-Pippidi (2019) which looks at the nature and impact of European technical assistance on the development of institutional capacity in central europe and "Neighbourhood" countries

Romania Confronts Its Communist Past: Democracy, Memory, and Moral Justice; by Vladimir Tismaneanu and Marius Stan (2018) – both Romanians. The first who left Romania in the 1980s and returned briefly in the early 2000s to chair a Presidential commission into the impact of communism on the country, the second who still works in Romania. The book is a very personal take on how that Presidential Commission fared.  

In Europe’s Shadow – two cold wars and a thirty-year journey through Romania and beyond; Robert Kaplan (2016) - a fascinating book by an American journalist who has had a soft spot for Romania since the beginning of his career. It has an element of the “Common Book” tradition about it with its breadth of reading

The Great Rebirth – lessons from the victory of capitalism over communism ; Anders Aslud and Simeon Djankov (2015) which tells the story from the view point of some of the key actors at the time – with all the strengths and weaknesses that genre involves

Ruling Ideas – how global neoliberalism goes local Cornel Ban (2016) which is a left-wing Romanian critique of how neoliberalism got its grip on countries such as Romania and Spain

A Concise History of Romania; Keith Hitchins (2014) Very readable analysis by the American historian who knows the country’s history best.

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

Theft of a Nation – Romania since Communism; Tom Gallagher (2005) powerful critique

Romania – borderland of Europe; Lucian Boia (2001) Very readable and well translated study by a Romanian historian

RGY posts

Crowds and Power

https://nomadron.blogspot.com/2018/11/plus-ca-changeplus-cest-la-meme-chose.html

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)

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)

travelling curiously

Yesterday I mentioned Wilkinson and Picket book on Equality. It’s called The Spirit Level and has caused such a stir that, when I saw it on offer on Amazon for 5 pounds, I decided it was time to buy it. The authors have also set up an Equality Trust website to promote its ideas. From which I take the following snippet. A couple of young guys have been so inspired by the book that they have organised a bike ride to Sweden to explore at a human level what it means to be living in a more equal society. They will chat with people they meet – recording and blogging about the interviews. Their journey has just begun and their blog can be followed at exploring equality
In this idea of combining travel and talk with treatise, they follow an honourable tradition – for example, William Cobbett’s Rural Rides in the 1820s; George Orwell’s 1937 Road to Wigan Pier and, in 1996, Robert Kaplan’s The Ends of the Earth: A Journey to the Frontiers of Anarchy

I have been stuck too long in the laptop and books. The weather has been steadily improving in the last few days here in the mountains and I must now get out, exercise the muscles and breathe the marvellous air into my lungs. But one last snippet – this time a reading list which one of the UK’s new Foreign Ministers apparently has for the summer!

pace of life

Up early again and, as I sat on the patio and saw the clockhand move to 09.00, I realised how quickly time is moving. I thought that time was supposed to stand still at this time of life – but it is in fact moving too fast. I would happily freeze this time of day before the world moves into gear – and that, perhaps, is why I am drawn to my Carpathian house in Sirnea and to this part of the world. They move at a slower pace.
One of Le Monde recent features (in the book section) was about the new distance between journalism and literature, focussing on one Joseph Kessler (one of their greats at his height in the 1930s), on Ryszard Kapuscinski and on Hunter Thompson – with no mention of people like Tom Wolfe, Norman Mailer, Jan Morris, Colin Thubron (whose Behind the walls I have discussed here) and Jonathan Raban whose 1979 Arabia through the looking glass I am now reading. The last two are particularly good in the way they let other people talk and say interesting things. The trouble, I suppose, is that there are so many excellent writers in this genre - Neal Ascherson, William Dalrymple, the great Hans Magnus Enzenberger, Joan Didion (perhaps more political) to mention but a few. And where do you place people like Theodor Zeldin (Intimate History of Humanity) and Robert Kaplan with his historo-travologues? It’s interesting (for me) that my taste in reading has become more journalistic and less abstract.

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