Cultural differences

I have quite few websites about the EU on my favourites bar – but don’t often access them since they are either too technical or too predictable. I’ve just looked at the two which are in my “links” on this site and have to wonder why I put them there! Neither gives any real sense of what’s going on in the EU. But I’ve just hit (through the Social Europe site) a blog which seems genuinely informative about a range of EU activities; gives links for further reading; and which resists the temptation of self-indulgent raving to which too many blogs succumb (“yours truly” excepted, of course!)
I mentioned recently “The geography of thought” – the book which reports on the experiments which take the writing of people like de Hofstede and Trompenaars about differences in cultural behaviour a stage further – to suggest that Europeans and Asians literally see the world differently and think differently. By coincidence I read in parallel Lucy Wadham’s The Secret Life of France – which is a delightful dissection of the mental and behavioural DNA of the Parisian bourgeois. She uses the country’s interesting mix of Catholicism and Revolutionary principles to offer an explanation of why the English (I use the term for obvious reasons!) and the French find it so difficult to understand one another – whether in matters relating to infidelity or diversity. Have a look at some of the 77 reviews on the Amazon site to get a sense of her argument.
The differences between Bulgaria and Romania is a fascinating issue for me. The Danube does not just act as a geographical but as a cultural and even physiognomic (?) boundary. Witness the way the voice timbre of women drops and their “sini” (glands) grow in the 2 minutes it takes to cross the great bridge which connects Giurgiu from Russe! Another difference I noticed the other day is that all the plastic Bulgarian pepper pots seem to be recyclable (the tops unscrew to allow you to top up) – whereas the Romanian ones are not! Very significant! I was also interested to read that the Romanians share with the Serbians a feature which I find most annoying – a search for blame and an almost sadistic delight in pointing out apparent contradictions in their interlocuteur’s conversation. A classic example was this week when I told my partner about the crack which had developed in the mountain house toilet. “No”, I replied, “I remember very clearly flushing the toilet after I had turned off the water in January; and not only did I put salt in the toilet water remaining but I remember squeezing the water in the toilet basin with a cloth!” “But”, Came the suspicious query, “Why did you need to add salt if you had squeezed the water out?”! I rest my case!
And let's not talk about the various ways people conduct arguments - with the tentative explorative style fitting very ill with the aggressive debate which seems to characterise what we might call Latin nations???

The politics of reform

I’ve had sadly little feedback on my paper on Chinese Administrative Reform (although I do get an occasional “hit” on my blog from there). But one friend gave me a great two page commentary on it which made, amongst other points, the following interesting comments –
• it’s difficult to absorb in one paper so much stuff both about how the Chinese public services seem to work and the reform efforts of Western European countries in the past few deadaes. Make it two separate papers!
• Although its apparent focus is China, it can be read with benefit by all public admin people (which would perhaps argue for keeping its ambitious focus on both China and the Western experience?)
• It draws (like almost all public admin literature) too much on anglo-saxon experience. What about India, South America, Indonesia for example??

I very much agree with the last point – and have indeed myself complained about the bias of so much of the material. Spanish-speaking academics are in a better position to help us understand interesting developments in the past decade in the various countries of Latin America – and indeed a bit of a search can unearth relevant material in English about that continent’s experience. For example, a recent 200 page book (which can be completely downloaded) on the various global efforts to make countries more democratic contains three chapters on Latin American experience. The book also has a chapter on the recent decentralisation in India; on Indonesia; and Lebanon. And a useful overview by Philippe Schmitter (whose 2004 paper for the Council of Europe on the democratic deficit in European countries I had missed)
But a 2001 paper by Patrick Heller on the politics of decentralisation in Kerala, South Africa and Porto Alegre is much more focussed on these issues. The purpose of Heller’s article is to - The paper rightly emphasises that effective reform of state organisations is political – and comes from external pressure (not from within). For examples, strong local government has historically come from working class pressure but this does not necessarily lead to social change and justice -

especially in an era when globalization has weakened the ability of nation-states to deploy the regulatory and redistributive instruments through which European states evened social opportunities and incomes in the mid 20th century.
Equity-enhancing reforms in both South Africa and Brazil have, for example, been frustrated. And even in Kerala, where working-class mobilization has a longer history and has wielded significant redistributive results, disappointing economic growth, the pressures of liberalization, and the declining service efficiency of the state have all combined to threaten earlier gains in social development.
This leads us to the second problematic of democratization, namely the institutional character of democratic states. Even where formal democracy has been consolidated, the question arises as to just how responsive these democracies are. Developing states have become politically answerable through periodic elections, but have the bureaucratic institutions they inherited from authoritarian or colonial rule become more open to participation by subordinate groups? Have they really changed their modes of governance, the social partners they engage with and the developmental goals they prioritize? Is the reach and robustness of public legality sufficient to guarantee the uniform application of rights of citizenship?
Decentralization in the developing world, especially when driven by international development agencies, has more often than not been associated with the rolling back of the state, the extension of bureaucratic control, and the marketization of social services.
Because such a project is tantamount to fundamentally transforming the exercise of state power, it requires an exceptional, and in most of the developing world improbable, set of political and institutional opportunities.
In South Africa, the Indian state ofKerala, and the Brazilian city of Porto Alegre, new political configurations and underlying social conditions have converged to create just such a set of opportunities.
Most visibly, left-of-centre political parties that were born of popular struggles have come to power and inherited significant transformative capacities. The ascendancy of the African National Congress (ANC), the Communist Party of India–Marxist (CPM), and the Partido dos Trabalhadores (PT) have all been associated with the formulation of clear and cohesive transformative projects in which the democratization of local government was given pride of place. Although the parties in question have captured power at different levels of the state—the national, provincial, and municipal, respectively—they have all enjoyed, and indeed used, their authoritative powers to initiate fundamental reforms in the character of local government.
If a committed political agent is a necessary ingredient for administrative and fiscal devolution, the democratic empowerment of local government is critically dependent on the dynamics and capacities of local actors. Again, the cases examined here are quite exceptional. All three boast a rich and dense tapestry of grassroots democratic organizations—the historical legacy of prolonged mass-based prodemocracy movements—capable of mobilizing constituencies traditionally excluded from policy-making arenas, and dislodging traditional clientalistic networks.

But the building of local democratic governmentrequires not only that a favorable political alignment be maintained but that a delicate andworkable balance between the requirements of institution building and grassroots participation be struck.
Subtle differences in political configurations and relational dynamics can thus produce divergent trajectories.
In the cases of Kerala and Porto Alegre, initial reforms that increased the scope of local participation have been sustained, and have seen a dramatic strengthening of local democratic institutions and planning capacity.
In contrast, in South Africa a negotiated democratic transition that has been rightfully celebrated as one of the most inclusive of its kind, and foundational constitutional and programmatic commitments to building “democratic developmental local government” have given way to concerted political centralization, the expansion of technocratic and managerial authority, and a shift from democratic to market modes of accountability.
If democratic decentralization in Kerala and Porto Alegre has been conceived as a means of resurrecting socially transformative planning in an era of liberalization, local government in South Africa has become the frontline in the marketization of public authority. Given the similarity of favorable preconditions—capable states and democratically mobilized societies—we are confronted with an intriguing divergence in outcomes.

Finally, a nice fable from the Real Economics blog.

explore the conditions under which a distinctly democratic variant of decentralization—defined by an increase in the scope and depth of subordinate group participation in authoritative resource allocation—can be initiated and sustained.
Across the political spectrum, the disenchantment with centralized and bureaucratic states has made the call for decentralization an article of faith. Strengthening and empowering local government has been justified not only on the grounds of making government more efficient but also on the grounds of increasing accountability and participation. But to govern is to exercise power, and there are no a priori reasons why more localized forms of governance are more democratic.
Indeed, the history of colonial rule was largely a history of decentralized authority in which order was secured and revenues extracted through local despots.

More thoughts about neighbourhood strategy

I reached the limit of creativity last week with the draft of my paper for the Varna Conference of NISPAcee. The present draft (updated 9 April) basically looks critically at the European Commission’s 2008 “Backbone strategy" for improvement of Technical Assistance; and at the absence of any public discussion of the various tools it uses in its good governance projects. The one exception is the “democracy promotion” strand of work where Richard Youngs is particularly prolific. Indeed I discovered today an important book he edited in 2009 which matches the concern I voice in the second part of my draft paper - about the failure of the EU to understand properly the context of neighbourhood countries and to adjust TA accordingly. The book has the marvellous title of “Democracy’s Plight in the European Neighbourhood – Struggling transitions and proliferating dynasties” with chapters on Bulgaria, Romania, Moldova, Serbia, Turkey, Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Ukraine, Russia, Kazakhstan, Belarus, Egypt, Algeria and Morocco

But my point still remains – that few people (certainly in the EC) seem to be looking at how state institutions and local government can realistically be developed in neighbourhood countries in a way helps develop a real citizen- or customer-orientation and which is sustainable. For example in 2009 Sigma produced a very important paper which suggested that the work of the merit-based civil service agencies established with EC Technical Assistance were being undermined. Very few people are casting such an analytical eye over the work of institution-building in neighbourhood (let alone recent member) countries. The Court of Auditors’ 2007 Report (which provoked the Backbone strategy) was concerned with procurement procedures – it is questions about the substance which are overdue.

In 2007, the Journal of Democracy, for example, had an excellent paper by Tom Carothers which looked at some of the global thinking about the institutional development process which affects the Technical Cooperation field. He took exception with the argument that democracy should take second place to the establishment of the rule of law. Tom Carothers (US Aid) is a rare voice of logic, clarity, experience and balance in the world of international aid subject (Brinkerhoff is another) - and their articles are so good that they rate folder of their own in my laptop library. In 2009 Carothers produced another paper which looked at the experience and discussion of the past decade with rule-of-law projects. His paper points out the ambiguity of that term - which finds support from a variety of ideological and professional positions and therefore leads to confused implementation if not state capture.
I need to work all this into the new draft of the Varna paper. Feedback would be much appreciated!
The painting is an Alexander Milenkov

Music and book links

A strong white-out greeted me this morning – a light snow covering and thick mist. One of the nice things about a nomadic life (at the moment the less exotic sort of having one’s books and music spread over 3 Romanian properties) is (re)discovery. The Bucharest flat is tiny and needs therefore the occasional transfer of books, paintings and other artefacts to the other 2 places. This week I took some CDs and came across a CD I had forgotten about - The Finnish composer Arvo Paerto’s Fratres played by the Orchestra of Flanders. It’s a stunning bit of minimalism for strings, wind and percussion. You can hear a rather inferior version of a cello section played by Columbia University Orchestra here. With the greater space I have in the mountain house, I’m able to use speakers to link up with the incredible number of internet musical channels – listed here. But my favourite is BBC World’s “Through the Night” programme which gives 6 hours’ daily listening available for a full week – with a written programme! When you hear a beautiful piece on the radio, it is very annoying to miss the brief identification you (sometimes) get at the end (particularly if it’s in a foreign language!). So top marks to the BBC!

I promised to mention a couple of googlebooks each entry. First David Korten’s latest book – Agenda for a new Economy - from Phantom Wealth to Real Wealthwhich continues his sterling effort in the last 2 decades to sketch out a better way. He is someone who practised mainstream economic consultancy – and then saw the error of his ways (see Prologue from page 11 of one of his first books). Such reformed gangsters make better analysts of the “mafia” system which is modern professionalism.
The second book is by the Swede, Erik Ringmar, whom I mentioned recently and is now a Professor at a Taiwan University - Surviving Capitalism; how we learned to live with the market and remained almost human. Apart from the clarity and iconoclastic tone, the book is distinctive in giving us a historical “take” on neo-liberalism.
The painting is Romanian - Theodor Pallady

hypocrisy, uncertainty and language

I don’t like gossip and character assassination. But how do you deal with hypocritical people? One of the editors of Social Europe - a site which deals with social democracy and European policy – has come to the defence of one of the LSE academics most prominent in pushing for the acceptance of the poisoned Gaddafi money - David Held. In so doing he drew attention to the public disparagement of Held by an ex-LSE academic Erik Ringmar who had a run-in with the LSE for some blunt remarks about academia. I followed the links and find an eloquent, tough and maverick writer who, amongst other books, has written an interesting tract about and for bloggers which can be downloaded via his Wikipedia entry. I know Held only from his academic reputation – but can well imagine that he was seduced by power. And Simon Jenkins’ and Kenneth Roy’s comments this week about Will Hutton’s report on high-pay (for the coalition government) also sugges that Hutton (whose various books in the past 15 years have been marvellous attacks on neo-liberalism and greed) has eventually succumbed to the disease of the rich and powerful - hypocrisy.
But attacks like this are rare – and courageous. Are they the best way to deal with the problem? I don’t know! John Keane (author of a huge recent volume on the Rise and Fall of Democracy) used a slightly different approach in an open letter to David held.

And in that same spirit of agnosticism let me continue the quotes from the article I mentioned yesterday on the stupidity of efficiency.

At the heart of the efficiency error is a dichotomy to do with knowledge and the way we store and use it.
When I discuss knowledge in the context of business I like to refer to “primary” and “secondary” kinds of knowledge. Dinosaurs are a good example of relying exclusively on the primary sort. Primary knowledge is compressed into simple routines. It is the kind of knowledge that says “when this happens, respond by doing x”. Easy. Cheap to store. Easily encoded. Easily replicated. Very easy to manage. And produces the same result every time.
Businesses love this kind of knowledge. It lies at the heart of the dumbing down in every large business. It makes the cost of management lower because you don’t need much management overhead to get consistent results.
Until, of course something changes. As in the environment shifting.
Then all that supremely efficient knowledge is rendered not just useless, but dangerous. Organizations who pride themselves on their efficiency are betting that their environment will justify their knowledge. They have, either explicitly or implicitly, planned that they know the future.
Secondary knowledge, by its nature, is high cost to deploy. It involves lugging around all sorts of unused rules that may or may not ever be deployed in action. There is always a tension between primary and secondary knowledge. Business prefers primary at all times since it is cheaper. Adaptation requires secondary since it allows change. Evolution has used both, but the emphasis is on primary knowledge with the result that failed knowledge implies extinction. Dinosaurs being a good example. Perfect for a very long time. Constant evolution along a path that then became, suddenly, a poor one. Highly efficient. And then not at all efficient.

All of which points us to Taleb’s writings about the Black Swan – the need to think about the unthinkable. Here’s an interesting article of the implications of his argument for management. And also a journal from India with an excellent article about self-development .
Finally a good piece about what's happening to our language.

money, fear, sonorous music and stupid efficiency

Am I the only person who keeps adding books to his Google library (on the 1,000 mark at the moment) – and rarely goes back to read them? I’m going to try to mention the additions here for a week or so – to see if that will encourage me to go back and at least flick the new arrivals.
I have just added two recent books which show how what little democracy there was is being undermined by money and fear. The first is “Democracy Distorted; wealth, influence and democratic politics” by Jacob Rowbottom (2010) which focuses on Britain.
The second is “Freedom for Sale; Why the world is trading democracy for security” by John Kaempfer (2009)

Serendipity is a strange thing. A very sombre and powerful string ensemble piece yesterday morning on “Muzical”, the classical programme which accompanies me here all day here in the mountain house, turned out to be Richard Strauss’s Metamorphosen (for 23 string instruments) (von Karajan version)(Kempel version) composed in 1945 in the debris of Germany. We all know about Shostakovitch’s 1941 Leningrad symphony composed during the 900 day siege of that city but this is the first I knew of this great Strauss piece – one of his last. Shortly afterwards I was skimming the work of Ronald Dore – the great specialist on Japan – and, for some reason, decided to click the music link on my site which I rarely access. And there was a string Requiem of a similar harrowing power, composed in 1957 by a Japanese composer of whom I have never heard – Takemitsu. For some reason I thought that Shostakovitch's 8th string quartet was also from the Leningrad siege - but the internet put me right!

Finally – a great post on the Real Economics blog about efficiency

–“ I hate efficiency. I hate it with a passion. It always seems to drive people into making absurd and dangerous decisions. In a world where the future is unknowable, that is where uncertainty reins supreme, it is a very stupid strategy to attempt to be efficient. Dinosaurs were very efficient. Supremely so. They thus ruled the earth for a length of time that makes us look like tiny and insignificant amateurs. Their problem was that they became too efficient. They stopped thinking. They had no back up plan. They had no redundancy. So they could not withstand a shock in their environment. The unknown eventually popped up and rendered all that efficiency as monumentally inefficient. I realize that this is a gross simplification, but bear with me, it’s an analogy.
“Or, for the more modern amongst us, think of the Maginot line. A perfect defense system designed to withstand all that could be thrown against it. But not too good if the enemy simply drives around it.
Efficiency, it seems, is entirely contextual. What works well today and thus appears to be the height of elegant engineering, with efficiency fairly oozing from every corner, will collapse in an undignified heap tomorrow when the earth shifts, the environment or tastes change, or when new technologies simply make it all seem so quaint.
So I hate efficiency because it feels and looks like a fool’s game.
I say keep something in reserve. Because you never know.
The problem is that other people adore efficiency.”

Read the full post here. Definitely a link to make to that term in my sceptic's glossary!

European understanding

The Guardian has this week started a special series to throw more light for its readers on some European countries. This week it has various journalists in Germany – looking at everything from writing to football; next week France; then Spain and Poland. And they have also set up a subsite dedicated to Europe whose aims are expressed in the following terms

“As well as drilling down into different nations, we are also keen for the site to reflect – and inspire – more wide-ranging pan-European debates about the future of Europe as an idea and as a project, something that feels particularly urgent in this time of economic, political and social flux”.

And they ask for suggestions on writers to use; on themes to focus on; and on journals to link up with – in addition to some such as Der Spiegel and le Monde with which they are already linked.
Certainly their initial focus on particular countries is long overdue – it's actually easier for a Brit to find about what the Chinese are feeling and discussing than people in the various countries of Europe! If you don’t believe that have a look at the reading list in section 6 of my recent briefing paper on administrative reform in China. The Chinese-American migration and intellectual exchange has been a powerful mechanism for that. There seems very little equivalent for Europe. Ralf Dahrendorf ,Tony Judt and Perry Anderson are some of a very small group who have had the ability to focus intellectually on European themes and discussions and communicate them to us clearly. Perry Anderson’s papers on the ongoing debates in various European countries which he brought together in his 2009 book The New Old World are exceptional.

But please no more Euro-turgidity!
But the sub-site’s aim of encouraging “a wide-ranging pan-European debate about the future of Europe as an idea and as a project” seems to me to be getting things upside-down. We’ve had so many of these discussions about “europe as a project”– and it’s just the great and good talking past the public to one another. The great thing about the Guardian’s current series on Germany and the other 3 countries is that it is going into social and individual depth we don’t normally get (from British newspapers – the French and Germans are better at this!). Spending a day with a young Hamburg family was perhaps rather too easy a task . A more challenging and useful task would be to shadow a town politician for a day or so and write it up. If they chose the right (open) people we would get a very good sense of national concerns. The site should build on that – and help us see the commonalities in our everyday concerns. And to do so without the distortion of politicians, bureaucrats and businessmen (who all have their own powerful pan-European networks – which would, by the way, make an interesting theme for the site).

The anglo-saxon Bias
The Anglo-Saxon adversarial system of politics affects the way Brits talk and think about public issues. And our linguistic laziness means that, when we look for new ideas, it’s the US literature and practice we turn to (even when, like me, you’ve been out of the country for 20 years). For example, the literature review I started yesterday is almost exclusively American and British. I would like to plug into the thoughts of greens, left and other groups in the heartland of Europe – and learn what they are doing in practical actions (social enterprise), policies and discussions to help shape a shared vision and agenda for social change. Where do I go to find this out? Newspapers and journals are too general – and books so specialised and numerous that it needs a specialist to help. How do I find such people – who want and are able to communicate with me? I know that the discussion groups on the internet are supposed to help – but do not seem to be used by the people I want to get to.
A few years ago, Paul Kingsnorth did a great job in his book “One No; many Yeses” of giving us vignettes of the work going on around the world to deal with the downside of globalisation. We need more of that. And what about the threats faced by local government everywhere?
So that’s three possible themes for the new site. If something coherent can emerge from that, it will begin to make a reality of “Europe as a project”. It has to focus on shared concerns at a local level – not on elevated abstractions.
Certainly I get very frustrated with the anglo-saxon bias of what's on the net. Despite my nomadic existence in central Europe and central Asia, the internet and Amazon have kept me mentally in the anglo-saxon world with its profoundly adversarial systems. And it’s only recently that I have realised how imprisoning that has been for my field of public management reform and interest in social transformation. Scandinavia has always had a more open and consensual approach to social decisions – and Norway in particular retains its distinctive approach. Take the Norwegian Power and Democracy Project of 1998–2003 as an example. In 1997, the Norwegian Parliament (Storting) decided to launch a power and democracy study to analyse Norwegian democracy at the dawn of the twenty-first century (following up on an earlier study in the 1970s). An independent steering committee consisting of five researchers was assigned and 40 books and more than 100 articles/reports were produced as part of the project. That followed the Nordic Free Commune experiment of the 1980s and 1990s. We just don't get to know about such things from British journals and newspapers.

Gated communities
The barrier to our understanding of development in other European countries is not just linguistic. It stems also from the intellectual compartmentalisation (or apartheid) which universities and European networks have encouraged in our elites. European political scientists, for example, have excellent networks but talk in a highly specialised language about recondite topics which they publish in inaccessible language in inaccessible journals. What insights they have about each other’s countries are rarely made available to the wider public. The same is true of the civil service nationals who participate in EC comitology or OECD networks – let alone the myriad professional networks. We talk about gated communities – but they exist virtually as well as physically.

Whose perspective - and voice?
The potentially exciting thing about this venture (as I understand the proposal, it will be a blog site)is that we would hear from than the voices of politicians and journalists. Several of the (ex-pat) respondents on the discussion thread offered to write. Others suggested big names (eg Umberto Eco; Julian Barnes; Claudio Magris; Hans Magnus Enzensburger. I mentioned Geert Mak and Jan Morris). On reflection it would be good to have the contributors to this site being those who know their subject without necessarily being a professional specialist and who can write elegantly (without necessarily being a journalist).
Spiegel and le Monde are easy partners since they already have English versions. But there are a few European level ventures worth plugging into the venture eg Sign and Sight which translates outstanding articles by non-English language authors and Eurozine which is a network of 75 European highbrow journals and translates interesting articles into at least one major European language. I've added these two to the Links on the right-hand column on this blogsite.