Desperately seeking...Satire

I’ve talked before about the power of satire. Fortuitously, this morning, I found a good example of its use. Contrast today’s report from the OECD about the “wealth gap” and the failure of the “trickle-down” theory of change with this satirical diatribe on the Daily Show  (which I found as a link on the discussion thread)

Until now, I wasn’t a fan of John Oliver – he just didn’t seem to be able to hold a candle to Jon Stewart on the show but what I’ve seen in the clips I’ve viewed so far today has changed my mind. The combination of biting comment with irreverent (and irrelevant) photoshots and sound bites is a powerful mix – as you will see in his treatment of the issue of “net neutrality” which he effectively parses and deconstructs, in Orwellian fashion, as actually “f***in corporate takeover”  

Satire has long been a powerful weapon against the pretensions of power – Voltaire’s Candide and Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels are well-known literary examples. Ralph Steadman and Gerard Scarfe are modern caricaturists in the tradition of Hogarth; and the Liverpool poets (Roger McGough, Adrian Henry) sustained the protestors of the 1960s. British people are not so familiar with the Bert Brecht’s City poems or the savage anti-bourgeois paintings of Georg Grosz in the 1920s and 1930s.

A powerful satirical essay “Democracy, Bernard? It must be stopped!” was penned by the author of the Yes Minister TV series and exposes the emptiness behind the rhetoric about democracy and government. It is available only on my website at -

In 1987 Management Professor Rosabeth Kanter produced “Ten Rules for Stifling Initiative” which I have often used to great effect in Central Asian training sessions.

1999 saw the appearance of The Lugano Report; on preserving capitalism in the twenty-first Century which purported to be a leaked report from shady big business but was in fact written by Susan George.

Management guru Russell Ackoff’s great collection of tongue-in-cheek laws of management – Management F-Laws – how organisations really work ( 2007)  As the blurb put it –“They're truths about organizations that we might wish to deny or ignore - simple and more reliable guides to managers' everyday behaviour than the complex truths proposed by scientists, economists and philosophers”.  An added bonus is that British author, Sally Bibb, was asked to respond in the light of current organizational thinking. Hers is a voice from another generation, another gender and another continent. On every lefthand page is printed Ackoff and Addison's f-Law with their commentary. Opposite, you'll find Sally Bibb's reply. A short version (13 Sins of management). A typical rule is – “The more important the problem a manager asks consultants for help on, the less useful and more costly their solutions are likely to be”.

Robert Greene’s 48 Laws of Power may not be satire but it is a very salutary counter to the thousands of unctuous managment  texts which attribute benign motives to senior management. 

A spoof on the British Constitution produced a few years ago is another good example of the power of satire. A Guardian article just a couple of days ago drew our attention to the apparent decline in Britain of the genre and linked to an older piece in the LRB

Intellectual autobiographies

We all search for meaning in our lives – which is why I find it puzzling that intellectual biographies and histories seem so rare….. I mentioned, the other day, the recently published Worldly Philosopher – the odyssey of Albert O Hirschmann

Another book of that genre I enjoy dipping into is Comparative European Politics – the story of a Profession – which presents a portrait of a profession, through intellectual (auto)biographies of the older generation of leading scholars in the field such as Hans Daalder, Juan Lintz, Richard Rose, Giovanni Sartori and Vincent Wright. The book gives a wonderful picture of intellectual endeavour in the post-war period showing how particular experiences turned them towards the study of politics when it was still a quiet field.

My uncle – Wilfrid Harrison - was actually one of the first post-war UK Professors of Politics which may partly explain the turn my life took – with the fateful decision in 1962 to switch at University from modern languages to politics and economics!

“The Story of a Profession” describes the scholarly infrastructure for international research which they developed in the post-war period and offers stories of academic careers, of achievements and of doubts, of lessons learned or imparted.

One of the lesser known figures paints here a rare landscape of life in 1940s Germany – and Richard Rose also has a vignette.

But patient surfing on the internet on the last 24 hours has unearthed quite a treasure trove – starting with a great interview with political anthropology Professor Cris Shore  whose work (on the EC) I had noticed some weeks back and who turns out to be the son of a famous Labour Minister (in the 1960s Wilson Government)

That, in turn, led me to these reflections of leading Public Admin Professor RAW Rhodes – whom I had come across in the 1970s as he was starting his academic career – and to an amazing number of articles and books easily available in which he dissects and challenges the British political tradition. One review puts it as follows

Rhodes’s project is to offer an account of what he and Bevir call the ‘stateless state’. This is an image of the state that focuses on the agents of the state – the civil servants, politicians and special advisors – rather than its institutional structure. The state for Rhodes is effectively the sum of their actions. But they do not have free reign: their agency is situated in various webs of relations and beliefs, which are themselves shaped and influenced by particular longstanding narratives and traditions.

Rhodes identifies three particular narratives which are highly influential: the Westminster narrative, which are the longstanding codes of conduct around political neutrality and service to the minister which govern the behaviour of civil servants;

the managerial narrative, which has become increasingly prominent in the UK since the 1960s and in which the practices of managing, reputedly based on the private sector, according to identifiable targets and with appropriate sanctions shape conduct in the departments;

and the governance narrative, in which coordination is achieved through the internal and external organisation of networks across the state and often into civil society as well.
These narratives are not necessarily complementary and often competing. The image that is produced is one of various agents reproducing the state through their constant negotiation between these received traditions and the problems and dilemmas that confront them, rather than the more familiar image of the state as powerful, hierarchical and ossified institutions wielding structural power

On my surfing I also came across a charming tribute to another comparative political scientist; and also this autobiographical essay by the neglected development economist Andre Gunder Frank  

Why are the reflective consultants hiding?

I referred in the last post to the tens (if not hundreds) of billions of euros spent in recent decades by international bodies on what we might call the “development industry”. That translates into thousands (if not hundreds of…) individuals like myself who transit the world’s air terminals and hotels working on projects designed to build organisational capacity in countries receiving technical assistance.

For almost as long as I remember, I’ve written reflections on my endeavours and published them

In this venture, I seem almost to be unique….Robert Chambers – a much more exalted figure than I could ever claim to be – is someone who, from his institutional base, has been able to combine practical work with theoretical reflections in the manner I aspire to. Albert Hirschmann is perhaps the real doyen of the genre. 

This morning I was delighted to encounter a new blogsite with the wonderful name Aidnography with a post – Where are the consultants hiding? - which is the first I’ve seen to deal with this deficiency

Every so often I receive a short email from a senior development consultant – women and men with probably 15, often 20 or more years of paid professional employment inside the ‘aid industry’ – they basically started before it was even called an ‘industry’!  The messages are usually short, sometimes straight from ‘the field’ (i.e. really uncomfortable, dangerous and complex locations) and often along the lines of ‘little do you/that researcher/this journalist really know about organization X or the crisis in region Y’. 

But with very few exceptions, these voices rarely make into the development blogosphere, let alone find their way into virtual, classroom or policy discussions. The proverbial ‘I will write a book about my time in the industry once I have retired’ approach only works for very few and even if they manage to write that book, the distance of a few years between what happened in, say, Rwanda and the publication creates a safer, but often also less relevant story. 

Why are senior consultants ‘hiding’? There are some more obvious reasons why senior consultants are often not very visible in public debates:·         They tend to be very busy: they have carved out their niche and are on the go to the next assignment in ‘their’ country, region or area of expertise
·         They tend to be older and may not have been socialized in the digital culture of sharing, being online and maintaining a digital presence or even a brand
·         They actually have something to lose if public critique leads to fewer assignments for a favourite organization or they are perceived as ‘difficult’ (many freelance senior consultants have quasi-employment status with some of the largest bi- and multilateral organizations)
·         They know development is a job; after decades of work, every profession, job or calling has been met with plenty of reality checks; even if you are not cynical or burned-out it is difficult to have similar discussion regularly or get excited when the latest ‘participatory bottom-up community design project’ turns out to be just like any other project with a budget, log-frame and quarterly reports
·         They do not really like the academic reflection business and prefer to get an assignment ‘done’ rather than reflecting on an industry that may not be responsive to critique anyway (see previous point)

On the other hand, their detailed and nuanced insights would be beneficial in many discussions on why certain organizations do what they are doing, who was resisting an idea and how difficult and political consensus building really is; they could also shed light on many realities in the field, the grey areas, the trade-offs, the secrets of the industry of how to get positive change going and how to avoid bureaucratic pitfalls etc. Or how they maintain marriages, families, well-being and gruesome travel schedules. 

How do we get access to senior consultants and get them to share their wisdom, stories and experiences (if they want to…)? Traditional formats, like inviting them to (academic) conferences and workshops, usually fail or are limited to the context of one event.  The IRIS Humanitarian Affairs Think Tank is an interesting approach that connects researchers and humanitarian practitioners in an academic framework with support from SaveThe Children. And there are probably similar projects that I am not aware of and that you are most welcome to share with me so I can add it to this post.  So what other formats can we think of? Writing retreats that aim at producing a publication through a book sprint rather than going through traditional publishing channels?  Or do we need more traditional, multi-sited research that works along those busy schedules and may include interviews in unusual locations, e.g. airport lounges, R&R hotels or organizational debriefings?
At this point in time, I am thinking out loud really and I am grateful for comments, suggestions and ideas!

The Missionary Position

“Getting to Denmark” seemed an appropriate title for the collection of musings I’m trying to edit about the challenges which technocrats and academics funded by international bodies have wrestled with over the past 2 decades in ex-communist countries – particularly those of us working to try to build the capacity of state bodies there – whether central or local. 
Several billions of euros have been spent on such efforts (not including the hundreds of millions spent in the last decade by Structural Funds in these countries which have employed local rather than international staff)

The musings are a small selection of blogposts I’ve done over the past 5 years - which build on two long papers I produced a few years ago -
- “administrative reform with Chinese and European characters” (2010)  - whose last section  is a summary of the sort of lessons I felt I had learned about public administration reform in Western Europe 
- “The Long Game – not the logframe” (2011) was a caustic paper I presented to the 2011 NISPAcee Conference ( building on an earlier paper to the 2007 Conference) in which I took apart the superficiality of the assumptions EC bureaucrats seemed to be making about the prospects of its Technical Assistance programmes  making any sort of dent in what I called (variously) the kleptocracy  or “impervious regimes” of most ex-communist countries.  

But the adrenalin released by the 50 lengths I try to swim regularly in the Rodina Hotel here made me realise today that “The Missionary Position” is a better title – not only in the sense of potentially getting more hits but of its hitting the target better…… 
After all, what have most of us “Westerners” in ex-communist countries been doing these past 25 years (however little we may have recognised it) – if not “proselytising” (in almost evangelical fashion)  for better systems of what the jargon has (significantly also since 1989) taken to calling better “governance”???

I have always had a problem with this term - which seemed to cover broadly the same issues as the discipline I had known as “public administration” – although I grant you that “governance” has given more emphasis to anti- corruption, coordination, transparency and pluralism.

Volumes have been written about the change of terms – and its significance (one of the best is Whatever Happened to Public Administration? (2004)

In 2007 I did actually use the title “Missionaries, Mercenaries or Witch-Doctors?” for a paper I presented to the Annual NISPAcee Conference (in Slovenia) but, until now, I hadn’t made the connection between my activities since 1990 and the wider process of evangelism – let alone “colonisation”.  Only today did I read an article which used an anthropological approach to interpret the sort of people who go on “missions” to “developing” countries

Most “experts” are trapped in their particular world (geographical and/or intellectual) – be it of “political science”, “sociology”, “economics”, “management”, “public administration”, “europeanisation” or “development”.

Each has its own distinctive networks of socialisation, approval and punishment. Those of us who prowl the edges of these disciplines run the risks all renegades do – of neglect, ridicule, calumny, ostracisation ….except that we were never there in the first place to be ostracised!

Is Denmark actually worth getting to???

I have been viewing, for the first time, the first part of the 2011 Scandinavian television series The Bridge – which follows a Danish policeman and a Swedish policewoman as they criss-cross the 8 kilometre Oresund Bridge (which links Copenhagen and Malmo) in the search of a killer mastermind.

The townscapes are stunning; but the characters and societies presented positively dystopian – and have you wondering whether Denmark (where I lived for a year - in 1990) is actually worth getting to!!

Coincidentally, today’s Guardian has an interview with the Danish star – Kim Bodnia   

What, the journalist asks, is the appeal of shows such as The Bridge?
"We are caught up in the darkness, the evil and the misery – we just do those best." Even though Bodnia, 48, is one of the most genial interviewees I've encountered, as he sets out this theory he sounds like a cross between Kierkegaard and Ingmar Bergman.But surely you can't be right about that. Isn't Denmark regularly voted the happiest country in Europe?
"It is, but you wouldn't guess that from our film or TV."
 True – Danish film has been not just one of the most engrossing national cinemas, but unremittingly, cherishably bleak. And Bodnia in his early days as an actor was part of this Nordic noir movement: "I was always good at playing evil……..- The Swedes got there first – their dramas were always the darkest and most upsetting, and we used to love them when I was growing up in Denmark. Now us Danes have caught up."

The popularity of recent Danish and Swedish crime films, including the adaptations of Larsson's Millennium trilogy, can possibly be traced back to Ingmar Bergman's 1962 film Winter Light, which dramatised the Swede's existential crisis…………..

The reason the series been so compelling is not so much to do with the whodunit, but rather the relationship between the 2 detectives. Yes there have been odd couples in crime dramas before (Morse and Lewis, Holmes and Watson, Clouseau and Cato, not to mention Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson in HBO's marvellous new series True Detective), but none so fruitful as these two. Norén is a cop with Asperger's (even though that word never appears in the script) and so emotes very little, but solves crimes with devastating deductive skills. She takes the inversion of gender roles one step further than Sarah Lund: sure, she effectively plays the traditional male role (though she's much more rule-bound than Lund) and is equally affectless, but she confers on her male co-worker the traditional female attributes seen in detective dramas.

Getting to Denmark

Readers know that, for the past 24 years, I’ve been involved in efforts to strengthen the effectiveness of various state institutions in such countries as Azerbaijan, Bulgaria (where I am now), Hungary, Kyrgyzstan, Romania and Uzbekistan. I’m trying at the moment to edit a collection of my musings over the past 5 years about this work – to which I’ve given the tentative title of “Getting to Denmark” which is the rather ironic phrase used in the last couple of decades to refer to one of the basic puzzles of development – how to create stable, peaceful, prosperous, inclusive, and honest societies (like Denmark).

We owe the phrase to Francis Fukuyama - of "End of History" and The Origins of Political Order fame – although the issue is one to which thousands of experts have bent their minds and careers for more than half a century.

Fukuyama’s small 2004 book “State-Building: Governance and World Order in the 21st Century” appeared at the end of a decade which had seen organisations such as The World Bank lead the charge against the very notion of the State. The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, after all, had confirmed the anti-state, pro-greed philosophy which had begun to rule Britain and American during the Reagan and Thatcher years and became enshrined in the global ideology which has ruled us since - of ruthlessly transferring state assets to the private domain.

Fukuyama’s focus on how state capacity could be strengthened went, therefore, against the grain of a lot of thinking – although his main interest was trying to understand what makes some states successful and others fail? To what extent, he was asking, can we transfer our knowledge about what works in one state to another?

We know what ‘Denmark’ looks like, and something about how the actual Den­mark came into being historically.

But to what extent is that knowledge transferable to countries as far away historically and culturally from Den­mark as Bulgaria, Moldova and Romania?”

To be honest, his question didn’t mention Bulgaria and Romania - but, rather, Somalia. But the question remains since Bulgaria has made absolutely no progress in the last 25 years. And Romania only in the last couple of years.

Here’s how a Bulgarian friend of mine put it recently..

Now, how can we talk of any improvement when from 9.0 million in 1989 the Bulgarians today number 7.5 million? An estimated 2.0 to 2.5 million people having left for good, of which about half represent the quintessential “brain drain”. This exodus represents in my view a self-inflicted national genocide that the ruling Nomenklatura is collectively guilty of, and should one day be held accountable for.
How can we talk of improvement in the economic situation of a country which 20 years after 1989 has a GDP about the same size as it was then? What do we make of the facts that today:·      

-      about one third of the population is living below the poverty line;
·         about one third is just hovering at and above it;
·         the minimum monthly salary is less than 150 euro;
·         the minimum pension is less than 140 euro, and that is just above the (official) poverty line; you might want to learn that there are about 3 million retired people in this country – obviously a large portion of them seek additional source of revenue, such as e.g. in the grey economy; the rest rely on remittance from abroad, in order not to starve, the alternative being scavenging the garbage bins;
·         the average monthly salary is less than 350 euro – if we assume that it is realistic, which it is not, being an official number as well, but it’d be too long to dwell on here;
·         before 1989, all Gypsies were working and all their kids were studying in school; today most Gypsy parents are unemployed and on state benefits (apart from those pestering the French, the Italians, Brits etc.) and – protected by idiotic EU policies – engage in theft, damage of property and all kind of other criminal activities, begging apart; and the majority of Gypsy kids boycott schooling, whatsoever;
·         before, education, medicare, social security, recreation were all free or quasi-free of charge – no more today;
·         before, there was an incredible emphasis on culture; today cultural life in Bulgaria is a 24 carats example of the perfect disaster;
·         before, there was respect for the traditional values (we are one of the oldest peoples in the world, respectively claiming one of the richest palette of traditions), unlike today when the only “value” ruling over here is the very same – first and only one – that rules America and, after being imported a while ago, in Western Europe: making money, and fast!
·         From a reasonably well economically developing – albeit under Soviet diktat – and prospering – no unemployment, no poor, no beggars, every citizen “middle class member,” no illiteracy, no housing problem, surplus in food, export of manufactured goods – country then, today’s “democratic” Bulgaria manifests all the characteristics of a banana republic and keeps sinking in the ranking, already a Third World member by most measures. What a remarkable accomplishment, indeed!

In brief, the “transition” from “Communism” to “Democracy” has brought the Bulgarian state to its knees and the Bulgarian people have been impoverished as never before in the country’s millennia old history. Contrary to popular belief, membership into EU has further contributed to the disaster. I have explained this in detail in my recent book “Bulgaria, terra europeansis incognita”

No wonder all independent polls today report that in 60-80% of the responses, within the relevant age groups, people consider having been better off prior to the arrival of “Democracy!” The masses being nostalgic to “Communism” is the true achievement of 20+ years under “Democracy” – that is the only real result which you could, in all fairness, take pride in contributing to, if you wish, no objections here. 

Now, before you stick to me a label of Commie or another affiliation of that sort, let me inform you that, in 1982, I defected to Belgium, where I am a citizen with accomplished career of executive in the microelectronic industry, recently retired, and my Bulgarian citizenship was restored only in 1994. Moreover, in 1954 my father, a regional enterprise director in Burgas, Bulgaria, was sentenced to death by the Communist “People’s Tribunal” for “economic sabotage of the young socialist republic,” in a mock up of a trial designed to scare the populace into submission. In 1955, at the age of 35, he has been executed, leaving behind a son of 7 and a daughter of 2; my mother has not been given the body, nor have we been shown his grave.

Nobody else, therefore, could be better qualified as advocate AGAINST Communism. …..but Communism (a single party Nomenklaturocracy) and Representative Democracy (a multi-party one) are basically the same animal, the ideology being used essentially as a tool to justify how all elites stay in power.

My recent post about the result of the Romanian Presidential elections shows that Romania has at last started to pull itself out of the vicious downward spiral. Time now to explore the reasons for these divergent paths in neighbouring countries.  

This 2009 paper by Alica Mungiu Pippidi - House of Cards – building the rule of law in ECE - gives a good insight into the efforts the EU has made in the past decade to get ex-communist countries to break away from their gangster cultures. But it doesn’t begin to explain the different paths these two countries have taken in the past few years…….

Honouring the past

I wonder if it is possible for Europeans (let alone Brits) to begin to put their head around how countries such as Bulgaria, Poland and Romania have suffered, in different ways, since 1939??

At least Poland had its various strands of resistance to be proud of.

And Romania its various emblems of modernity – visible in its architecture, inventors, writing or painting (to some of which I paid tribute earlier this year in my E-book on the country – Mapping Romania).

Indeed, as I was drafting this post, I was sent a poem from a poet – Mariana Marin – reckoned to be one of the best of modern poets and akin, in her power, to Sylvia Plath.

I hurry toward death

without a purpose,

without a wedding gown,

without a dowry of gold.

Without myself.

Serene and bitter,

I hurry across my native land

As if tomorrow had already been.

Needless to say – despite my love of Romanian poets such as Marin Sorescu and Ana Blandiana, I had never heard of Marin (who died in 2003).

But Bulgaria is small – with its back between the Danube and the Balkan/Rhodope mountain ranges – almost invisible……save, that is for its tourism – at the Black Sea and skiing resorts……

But it does have some people who have the skills and energy to project the country….particularly its artistic community – to whose early 20^th century (realist) painters I devoted a small book a couple of years ago

Earlier this year year I mentioned Ivan Daraktchiev’s amazing Bulgaria: Terra Europeansis Incognita - 600 pages of superb photographs and challenging text about the history (ancient and recent) of the country. Ivan doesn’t pull his punches as you will see from the next post…….

And yesterday I visited the Neron Gallery whose owner, Rumen Manov, is one of the best dealers in older Bulgarian paintings - to discover that he has just published a large 700-page celebration of some 2000 cultural artefacts and photographs from his own personal collection - in A Fairy Tale about Bulgaria. The Intro puts it eloquently -

We the people of this piece stretch of land called Bulgaria are not the end of Europe, hidden somewhere in the end of the world – we are one of the oldest European civilizations. In our history there are thousands purposefully forgotten dates and events. But although quite destroyed, surviving documents speak eloquently and impartially. We Bulgarians love our ancient and beautiful land and this book is an attempt to remember the bright, timeless and eternal values………

 I wanted to do something that is not an encyclopaedia, not an album , not almanac not historical guide or reference book. It was like a seed in the ground. When he started to grow this idea in my mind I could see the colours of the book, as I started to build in time things so hesitated that year - two, long before I finish the book, I had the idea for it. What I saw was difficult for me to explain it to people who work with me…..  then they told me that such a thing is not possible. This genre - no, moreover, that this is a job for an Institute not an individual. But the book is my witness to many survivors and their fathers, grandfathers -some of them departed from this world, things scattered in their markets and antiquarians. 

I salute such people who, against the odds, are determined to remind locals of their heroes and traditions - however politically incorrect it may be these (stupid) days........