Snippets

1. Romanian efficiency and European obfuscation and exploitation

I this week completed the (Pfeizer) vaccination process (in the city of Ploiesti) with Romania being credited with having vaccinated about 12% of its population – putting its performance very much in the main body of European countries.

And I have to say I was pretty impressed with the efficiency of the organization I saw in the school gymnasium – with help for those filling out the forms quickly on hand. 

As indeed I had been earlier when I had started the process of getting the new Certificate of Residence I require as a citizen of a country which is no longer a member of the EU. A Brexit help-desk has been set up in the Ministry of the Interior which deals with such things – and their response to my question about required health insurance was immediate, helpful and correct.

And the two visits I had to make to the Tax and Public Health authorities to acquire the necessary paperwork took only a couple of hours…

Even Romanians despair of their country – but my experience suggests that all is not lost! 

Ask me, however, about the paperwork I get from my (Austrian) bank; (Italian) electrical or (French) water companies – and that is a very different matter. I simply can’t understand the complicated information they send me…. The bottom line, however, is that they all charge too much….

 2. One Party Government

This May will see the Scottish Nationalist Government celebrate its 10^th year of overall control of the system of devolved government in my country (having initially operated as a minority government from 2007). Here’s a very useful – if dated - French take on the situation which doesn’t quite catch the recent sense that – despite the much-praised leadership of Nicola Sturgeon during the pandemic – the government had been somewhat inert in fields such as education. 

 One criticism which has been raised in recent years about the apparently social-democratic Scottish Nationalist Party (SNP) is of its tight discipline – any challenge to its authority is quickly dealt with. In a small country. This can and does profoundly affect reputations and careers.

The UK Civil Servant is a very useful and thoroughly independent website - so this critical assessment is all the more significant – 

The SNP came to power in Scotland having had no previous experience of government and with few core policies other than Scottish Independence. It had a charismatic and controversial leader in Alex Salmond but wasn’t supported by any heavyweight think tanks, nor by experienced Special Advisers. The new government accordingly leant heavily upon Scottish Government civil servants. The latter work within the rules and customs of the wider UK Civil Service, and in particular are supposed to avoid any sign of political allegiance. 

In practice, partly as a result of ministerial pressure, and partly because it was the only way to ensure smooth and effective administration, senior officials became close to SNP ministers and were more obviously supportive of SNP policies than their London colleagues (or the Public Administration Select Committee) thought wise. More recently, Scottish Permanent Secretary Leslie Evans has of course been accused of lack of impartiality in the handling of the investigation into Alex Salmond.

 The parallels with the Boris Johnson government in Westminster are all too clear. The Johnson Cabinet is weak and inexperienced, having been chosen exclusively from the ranks of Brexiteers. It has a charismatic but controversial leader and no obvious core policies other than to get Brexit done. Its promise to “fix the crisis in social care once and for all – with a clear plan we have prepared” was a lie. It didn’t have any idea how it intended to take advantage of post-Brexit freedoms, nor did it have an “oven-ready Brexit deal”.

Its closest supporters may not be drawn from post-UKIP ‘fruitcakes’ but they are certainly not drawn from mainstream industrialists, scientists and economists – or even heavyweight think tanks. Its most prominent Special Advisers, in the form of Dominic Cummings and his close colleagues, clearly had no clue how to get things done in government.

 But weakness has to be concealed under shows of apparent strength – with bullying and cronyism as a result. Lord Acton put it most succinctly – “All power corrupts – and absolute power absolutely…”

And it all culminated in recent weeks with committee scrutiny of the two leading figures in the Nationalist drama (Salmond and Sturgeon) - reduced in recent years to squabbling figures as Salmond has faced, and successfully fought off, accusations of sexual harassment – and then brought forward his own counter-accusations against the Scottish government and party figures of wrongful behaviour. The Scottish public may have had rich spectacles as a result – but it has hardly been an edifying or useful experience – as this rather gossipy LRB article makes clear - 

The committee appointed by the Scottish Parliament to inquire into the Scottish government’s mishandling of its investigation into the first two allegations against Salmond (both made by civil servants) has been sitting regularly since August 2020.

It rapidly descended into a partisan free-for-all, with opposition members less interested in the HR error which led the investigation to be ruled unlawful (after a judicial review brought by Salmond) than in trying to find the killer question that would somehow lead to Sturgeon’s resignation. They took evidence in the morning and took to social media in the afternoon. 

No one has come out of it well: not the committee members, or the obfuscating civil servants, or Salmond, who refused to apologise for his ‘inappropriate’ behaviour, or Sturgeon who, though full of regret, could not shed light on all her government’s mistakes………. 

The SNP’s problems are not all linked to the Salmond allegations. After nearly fourteen years in power, the party is exhausted. But, with or without Sturgeon at the helm, there is no effective opposition (the Tories’ Scottish leader isn’t even in the Scottish Parliament, and Scottish Labour’s leader, Anas Sarwar, its sixth in the last decade, has only just been elected). The polls were predicting that on 6 May the SNP would regain the majority it won in 2011 (despite a PR system that was supposed to prevent absolute majorities) and lost in 2016, but now a hung parliament is being forecast (and a drop to 49 per cent support for independence). I find it hard to imagine that the spirit of 2014 will ever be rekindled.

3. The new-style Clown politician

Beppe Grillo has a lot to answer for….Since his arrival in Italian politics more than a decade ago,  comedians have become serious political figures – although it was, arguably, Ronald Reagan who made politics a world of “make-believe”. It’s therefore entirely appropriate that it’s a dramatist who brings us this one of the best analyses of Boris Johnson 

Observe classic Johnson closely as he arrives at an event. See how his entire being and bearing is bent towards satire, subversion, mockery. The hair is his clown’s disguise. Just as the makeup and the red nose bestow upon the circus clown a form of anonymity and thus freedom to overturn conventions, so Johnson’s candy-floss mop announces his licence.

His clothes are often baggy – ill-fitting; a reminder of the clothes of the clown. He walks towards us quizzically, as if to mock the affected “power walking” of other leaders. 

Absurdity seems to be wrestling with solemnity in every expression and limb. Notice how he sometimes feigns to lose his way as if to suggest the ridiculousness of the event, the ridiculousness of his presence there, the ridiculousness of any human being going in any direction at all.

His weight, meanwhile, invites us to consider that the trouble with the world (if only we’d admit it) is that it’s really all about appetite and greed. (His convoluted affairs and uncountable children whisper the same about sex.) Before he says a word, he has transmitted his core message – that the human conventions of styling hair, fitting clothes and curbing desires are all … ludicrous. And we are encouraged – laughingly – to agree. And, of course, we do. 

Because, in a sense, they are ludicrous. He goes further, though – pushing the clown’s confetti-stuffed envelope: isn’t pretending you don’t want to eat great trolleys of cake and squire an endless carousel of medieval barmaids … dishonest? Oh, come on, it’s so tiresome trying to be slim, groomed or monogamous – when what you really want is more cake and more sex. Right? I know it. You know it. We all know it. Why lie? Forget the subject under discussion – Europe, social care, Ireland – am I not telling it like it is, deep down?

Am I not the most honest politician you’ve ever come across? Herein the clown’s perverse appeal to reason. 

Perry Anderson on the European Edifice

I’m delighted that someone (on Open Democracy) has seen fit to try to summarise Perry Anderson’s two important – but typically over-loqacious – LRB articles about the institutions of the European Union

Perry Anderson’s essay ‘Ever Closer Union?’ explores the significance of the different institutions within the European Union. Their common principle, he finds, is that they minimise democracy, with the leaders of the most powerful states directing the affairs of the union from within an impregnable fortress of rules.

Anderson starts with the European Court of Justice, established in 1952 as part of the European Coal and Steel Community, which evolved into the European Economic Community and eventually the EU - noting that the first president of the court was an Italian fascist, the first German judge a “devoted” Nazi, one of the first advocate-generals another German who was heavily involved in running occupied France during the war, and the other advocate-general a Vichy functionary, “in charge of co-ordinating the first wave of persecution of French Jews”.

Not all appointments to the court were fascists, but they “were nearly all political” – few had any legal qualifications.

The second set of appointments continued this pattern: a politician from Germany’s centre-Right Christian Democratic Union, the son of a leading Dutch politician, the brother of the Italian finance minister (and a former aide to the fascist minister of justice), a one-time Nazi, now Social Democrat, from Germany, an Italian who had helped administer occupied Rhodes in the war, a French appointee who had served the military governor of Algeria and a leading light of the French MRP, another Christian-Democrat party (who at least had a law qualification and had served as a minister of justice).

This latter, Robert Lecourt, “was an ardent federalist” who had been a member of the Action Committee for a United States of Europe, founded in 1955 by the influential European unionist Jean Monnet. It was Lecourt who “wrote [a] historic verdict overturning a national law” in a landmark case that a small Dutch company brought against the Dutch government.

The next year, Lecourt issued the judgment in another landmark case, brought by two Italian lawyers against their own government. With these two rulings, “the cornerstone of European justice was laid”.

After Lecourt became president of the court in 1967, he was joined as a judge by Pierre Pescatore, brother-in-law of the Luxembourg prime minister, who was “a more outspoken and prolific champion of federalism even than Lecourt”, with “one bold judgment after another sealing the court’s authority over successive aspects of the life of the Community”.

In Pescatore’s view, it was the spirit of the Treaty of Rome – the 1957 treaty that established the European Economic Community – rather than “a merely literal reading”, which must prevail. The court’s initiatives were “celebrated by [Dutch writer Luuk] van Middelaar as the coup that essentially founded today’s Union”.

Scholars such as Germany’s Dieter Grimm challenge Pescatore: those who drafted the treaties creating the European Coal and Steel Community and the European Economic Community, he argues, would have regarded the court’s key decisions as “revolutionary because the principles they announced were not agreed in the treaties... and almost certainly would not have been agreed on had the issues been raised”.

 

The British author Thomas Horsley also doubts the legitimacy of the court’s power-grabbing work: the Treaty of Rome granted the Court of Justice judicial oversight only “with respect to acts of the Union institutions”, not those of member states. The contrary decisions cannot be claimed to represent the spirit of the treaty when its text clearly states the opposite, says Horsley: the court “is irrefutably subject to compliance with EU treaties”.

 

All-powerful, incomprehensible

In any normal democracy, says Anderson, a court’s decisions are “subject to alteration or abrogation by elected legislatures. Those of the [Court of Justice of the European Union] are not. They are irreversible.” It would require a new treaty, signed by every member state, to overturn an Court of Justice decision – a wholly improbable scenario. Meanwhile, every decision has constitutional force, such that it must be reflected in each successive EU treaty, whose consequently extreme length renders them, in effect, “enormous cryptograms beyond the patience or grasp of any democratic public”. As the court’s current president said in 1990:

 

“There is simply no nucleus of sovereignty that the member states can invoke, as such, against the Community.”

 

But what of Germany’s ‘basic law’ (Grundgesetz), supposedly immutable, as administered by the German constitutional court in Karlsruhe? The judges there have declared that it cannot be overridden by the Court of Justice of the European Union, but in considering five challenges over the years have always avoided any actual confrontation.

Horsley criticises the European Court of Justice not just for its lack of democratic legitimacy but for its weakness in technical expertise, not least because a court of general jurisdiction is so wide in its scope that ‘expertise’ has little bearing.

Grimm makes a broader criticism: in issuing “prohibitions of discrimination against foreign companies” with such “missionary zeal”, “almost any national regulation could be understood as a market access obstacle”.

 

2. The European Commission

In his essay, Anderson turns then to the European Commission, the ‘government’ of the European Union, which comprises one politician from each member state, supported by tens of thousands of civil servants. He starts with its first president:

 

“Between 1958 and 1964, [Walter] Hallstein presided over a Commission that was a dynamo of energy in finding ways and means to circumvent the Treaty of Rome in the higher interests of European unity.”

 

The commission and its key directorates – for competition and legal services – were responsible for 80% of the cases brought before the Court of Justice, so building “an ever more extensive edifice of European law trumping the rights of national legislatures”: what Hallstein described in 1964 as “the beginnings of a real and full ‘political union’”.

It would be another 20 years before an equally activist president took office: Jacques Delors, “a far more charismatic and commanding figure than Hallstein”. He oversaw the introduction of the Single European Act and the drive towards a single currency, embodied in the Maastricht Treaty.

He also pursued a “solidarity” agenda, seeing redistribution as part of cross-regional social justice. However, the scale of the cohesion funds he secured was, Anderson thinks, “little more than the alms of an instrumental charity”.

 

Structurally, the enlargement of the European Union has allocated a commission post to each of the 27 remaining states, such that a majority, even if representing less than 13% of the EU’s population, could in theory outvote the commissioners from the six largest states, representing 70% of that population. But, says Anderson: “Decisions are always taken by ‘consensus’ – that is, behind a façade of unanimity, under impulsion or veto of the six major states.”

Commissioners are appointed for five-year terms and supported by 33,000 permanent bureaucrats, who preside over the union’s accumulated set of rules, the acquis communitaire, which has grown from some 2,800 pages at the time the UK joined the European Economic Community in 1973 to a mammoth 90,000 pages capturing all the behaviour and norms that a succession of subsequent applicants were required to sign up to before admission.

 

Anderson calls it “the most formidable written monument of bureaucratic expansion in human history”; together with the 34 “procedures” used within the commission, it makes the workings of the union virtually impenetrable for normal citizens – though presumably not for the army of 30,000 registered lobbyists in Brussels, mostly representing corporate interests.

 

The acquis – in its complexity and scope – serves further to consolidate the centrality of the court and the commission at the expense of member states, along with their constitutional courts, their diplomats and their civil servants; and it is in a state of constant expansion.

3. Powerless parliament

As for the European Parliament – originally a mere ‘Assembly’ – the minor accretions of power over the decades have scarcely moved the dial in terms of democratic accountability. The 705 MEPs, supported by a staff of over 7,000, cannot “elect a government, initiate legislation, levy taxes, shape welfare, or determine any foreign policy”. In short, concludes Anderson, “it is a semblance of a parliament, as ordinarily understood, that falls far short of the reality”, within which political differences become “all but completely invisible”.

 

Turnout in European elections has often fallen below the 50% mark; likewise, attendance by the deputies at parliamentary sessions. Most decisions on legislation are reached at ‘trilogue’ meetings between representatives of the commission, the parliament and the Council of Ministers, which comprises ministers from member states’ national governments. Anderson cites Christopher Bickerton’s book ‘European Integration’:

 

“Between 2009 and 2013, 81 percent of proposals [from the commission] were passed at first reading via the trilogue method; only 3 per cent ever reached third reading, which is where texts are debated in plenary sessions of the Parliament.”

 

Anderson sees a wide gap between the parliament and those it ostensibly represents. Eighty per cent of Dutch MEPs supported the draft European Constitutional Treaty, which was rejected by 62% of Dutch voters in 2005. The previous year, only 39% of the Dutch electorate had turned out for the European parliamentary elections; compare that with the 63% who voted against the wishes of their MEPs on the constitutional treaty.

“The Parliament,” Anderson says, “is the least consequential component of the Union” – but at least it supplies a “measure of the legitimation that any self-respecting liberal order requires”.

 

4. The European Central Bank

By contrast, the European Central Bank, created to manage the single currency under the Maastricht Treaty of 1992, is subject to no accountability other than the remote prospect of a new treaty. The Eurozone central banks nominate one member of its governing council each, supplemented by six executives. “Its proceedings,” notes Anderson, “are secret, its decisions are formally unanimous [and] no dissent is ever published.”

Although the economies of the Eurozone countries are very different, this fundamental factor was disregarded in what Anderson sees as a drive by the promoters of the euro “to create a currency which would lock those states that adopted it so close that they would be obliged to follow monetary union with political union”.

 

In practice, that political union proved beyond the reach of the Maastricht negotiations, but its absence has exacerbated the stresses inherent in managing economies of different sizes, different structures and different levels of development.

One way of dealing with these stresses would have been for the bank to issue public debt, but Maastricht forbade that: such was reserved for member states only. When Mario Draghi, the bank’s third president, found a way to evade this in order to deal with a financial crisis within the Eurozone in 2009, his head of research later told the Financial Times that “the whole concept of getting around European rules and doing QE [‘quantitative easing’, or creating money] without calling it QE was extremely clever”.

Draghi’s measures were in apparent contradiction to articles 123 and 125 of the 2007 Treaty of Lisbon and were legally challenged. The European Court of Justice came to the rescue, however, with what Thomas Horsley called “herculean” contortions.

The two essays appeared in the London Review of Books in January and are EACH some 10,000 words long. They may now have some restrictions on their viewing

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v43/n01/perry-anderson/ever-closer-union

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v43/n02/perry-anderson/the-breakaway

Cultural Despair?

It’s 60 years since Fritz Stern - whose family had had to move in 1938 to escape Nazi Germany - published his first book The Politics of Cultural Despair – a study in the rise of Germanic ideology, a quotation from which opens Anne Applebaum’s recent book about the authoritarian mood which has spread globally in the new millennium. There is a nice tribute here to Fritz Stern on his 70^th birthday which places the book in context 

The “Politics of Cultural Despair” charted the genesis and diffusion of the antiliberal, antiurban, anti-Semitic, and anticapitalist animus that lay at the heart of thinking about das Volk, and suggested that it was the penetration of these themes into German culture that made National Socialism plausible to many educated, middle-class Germans.

Stern's book was not the first to do so. But it did so with far greater subtlety, methodological sophistication, and plausibility than its predecessors. While Stern sought to demonstrate the link between trends in German culture and the rise of National Socialism, he did not mean to suggest that the sort of "cultural despair" he had traced was unique to German culture. Indeed, he insisted that the phenomenon of "cultural despair" was not confined to Germany, and that it had not ended with the defeat of Nazism.

Nor did he claim that the success of Nazism could be explained primarily by the cultural developments he had traced; only that its success could not be understood without taking those cultural developments into account. To put the book into context, it is worth recalling, however briefly, the sorts of treatment that the issue had already received when Stern's book came on the scene.

- Perhaps the most influential work on National Socialism to appear during the decade of the 1950s was Hannah Arendt's “Origins of Totalitarianism”, first published in 1951. Among its many peculiarities was its studious refusal to draw any connection between National Socialism and the peculiarities of German culture or German national development.

Curiously, however, Applebaum neither defines nor develops Stern’s concept of “cultural despair” which – with the pessimism of the past few years - would normally have been the subject of intensive dissection. But, to my knowledge, only Chris Hedges has published a major article on the subject. Could it be that the subject of Western decline has suddenly become of minor importance compared with that of global extinction?

Or is it simply that the subject is too gloomy to arouse interest? The French gadfly Eric Zemmour certainly doesn’t think so – he’s just published another outrageous book “French Melancoly” whose opening pages actually claim that France IS Europe!

I am therefore a bit diffident about imposing a post on the subject of declinism – which gets a good entry in Wikipedia – and will keep it brief

Each of us is unique but, somehow, in collectivities – with a common language – we develop common, distinctive traits…The sense of nationhood came slowly – kings, barons, armies and sailors in the Netherlands, Portugal and Spain acquired (and lost) empires without it apparently giving its present-day descendants a sense of grievance or inferiority…But what Fritz Stern called, in 1961, “cultural despair” has deeply affected other countries as they have confronted economic decline.

The UK is, of course, the prime example – with the 1960s in particular being fixated on the issue of the need to modernize and the 1970s on a sense of collapse

Andrew Gamble is a British political scientist who has not only followed closely the debate on economic decline but wrote a famous book about it “Britain in Decline” (1981) which went through four editions before succumbing to a 2000 critique “Rethinking British Decline”. Interestingly, one of the authors of this last book, Michael Kenny, went on in 2014 to produce “The Politics of English Nationhood” which anticipated the outcome of the 2016 Brexit Referendum.

It took France another decade before it was afflicted with the same condition with Eric Zemmour’s "La Suicide Francaise" being the first of a cascade of books which have deluged the French in the past few decades – as analysed in Melancholy Politics – loss, Mourning an memory in late modern France (2011)

Is economic decline the first stage of “cultural despair”?

What does it take for a collective sense of despair to reach the point of no return?

A New Authoritarianism?

Anne Applebaum is an American journalist with academic aspirations - who won her spurs writing about the excesses of Stalinism in the borderlands which Timothy Snyder describes in Bloodlands (2014). She is a quintessential member of the “Anywhere” tribe – globetrotting between her American, London and Polish bases – and her latest little book The Twilight of Democracy – the seductive lure of authoritarianism (2019) starts, not untypically, with a party in her converted Polish castle to celebrate the new millennium. But these days many of those present at the event of 20 years ago no longer even speak to her - because they have become hardened nationalist ideologues. Who is it, she wonders, who has changed? Her or them? 

The few who are still speaking to her are clear it is her….but she tells a different tale.

I was prepared to dislike the book but was won over by the chatty tone it adopts to the very serious issue of the rightward drift of Europe and America over the past quarter of century. Julien Benda was a French writer of the early part of the 20^th century who wrote a famous book “The Treason of the Intellectuals” (1927) chastising right-wing intellectuals for their role in bringing France to its knees….(Mark Lilla has a good article here on the book) And Applebaum uses the same device - with caustic vignettes of erstwhile “friends” in all three countries. The basic idea is the one set out by Keynes in his famous quote about 

"Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back". 

She might have explored this more systematically and suggested clear criteria to identify the key "scribblers" - falling back instead on those who just happened to be in her own and her husband’s gilded circle. The result is an entertaining, if risky, endeavor….Indeed, I don't think I;ve seen such a public falling out of the elite since Nobel-prizing-winning Elias Canetti's memoir "Party in the Blitz - the English years years" - with the significant difference that he waited a decade before publishing his posthumous diatribe! 

But what a pity Applebaum didn't deliver on the promise of her opening quotation from Fritz Stern's marvellous book on "The Politics of Cultural Despair"... despite her apt quotations from the likes of Roger Scruton – whose “England, an Elegy” (2000) is as good an example of cultural despair as you will ever find….Nor does she even mention Sebastian Haffner whose “Germany – Jekyll and Hyde – an eye-witness account of life in Germany” (and even more his raw posthumous “Defying Hitler”) is a stunning account of how easily ordinary Germans took up the opportunities offered when Jews were suddenly in early 1933 evicted from their flats and jobs

It was, of course, the Dreyfus case which got the French right-wing forces marshalled - and Emile Zola's J'Accuse which disbanded them (at least until 1940). The question these days is where is our Zola? An Australian economist who reckons that a third of us have an authoritarian streak (although no references are given). The "authoritarian personality” was a major focus of academic interest in the immediate post-war period not only with Hannah Arendt (quoted) but, even more, Theodor Adorno - who doesn't however get a mention. I was introduced to political sociology in the early 1960s by a Romanian, Zevedei Barbu  who had produced in 1956 a book which drew on both social psychology and sociology - Democracy and Dictatorship – so I’m sorry that Applebaum fails to pay any attention to this notion of the “authoritarian appeal”. 

Her take on it - such as it is -  is that the world has become so complex that we crave order. Which begs more questions than it answers. But her judgement of her erstwhile “friends” – that they were driven by frustrated ambition – rings rather truer and might have led to a more systematic discussion (linking up, for example, with Haffner's insights)

Chapter four opens with an important discussion of the dramatic change which has taken place in the last two decades in the dissemination of news. For a more systematic discussion about this I suggest people should read “The Power and the Story - the global battle for news and information" (2019) by John Lloyd which looks at how authoritarian states and the market have dealt recently with journalists - starting with chapters on China and Egypt.

One of my tests for a book is to go to the end and look at the bibliography and index. I trust those authors who refuse to follow the dreadful academic tradition of listing every book they know on a subject - and who have the confidence, instead, to select a small number of books they recommend for the reader’s attention. Particularly if they then add a few explanatory notes about each of the books. And this article suggested that I should use the index to check that the chapter headings promised in the book’s Contents are actually followed. Applebaum’s book – unusually for such a writer - has neither a bibliography or index.

Other reviews of the book; https://quillette.com/2020/08/01/twilight-of-democracy-a-review/ - from John Lloyd no less, the Head of the Reuter’s Institute for the Study of Journalism at Oxford

https://artsfuse.org/207714/book-review-twilight-of-democracy-a-slim-investigation-of-the-clerks/

Further Reading; In the past decade, we have been deluged by hundreds of books on the decline of liberal democracy and the various threats it faces – very little of it worth much. 

- The book I recommend as a guide through this confusion is David Runciman’s How Democracy Ends (2017) which uses the metaphor of a “mid-life crisis” to explore 4 different ways in which democracy might end – a coup; catastrophes such as ecological or pandemics; technological takeover; or “improved systems”. One of its nice features is embodying guides to other books in the text itself....

- Four Crises of American Democracy – representation, mastery, discipline, anticipation; Alasdair Roberts (2018) does look to be the best of the more detailed analyses of the deficiencies of the contemporary American system. Roberts produced recently the quite excellent "Strategies for Governing"

- I was not at all taken with ”The People v Democracy – why our freedom is in danger and how to save it”; Yashka Mounk (2018) but I’m biased since he worked for Tony Bliar’s Foundation. It has an index but no bibliography. 

- Empire of Democracy – the remaking of the West since the Cold War 1971-2017 by Simon Reid-Hentry (2019) was promising enough for me to buy it but was subsequently the focus of a brilliant and critical master-class review by historian Richard Evans (click title for that).It too has an index but no bibliography. 

Autocratization turns viral (Democracy report 2021 - from V-Dem institute) gives a useful update of how democracy continues to slip globally…

Bookmarks

I’m increasingly swamped by books – both physical and virtual – and just wanted to share some of the interesting titles which are on offer around me….. 

1. Histories of the entire region of east central Europe are not quite as rare you might think – although I have only one in my extensive physical library up in my mountain house. My virtual library can offer Inventing Eastern Europe – the map of civilization in the mind of the enlightenment by Larry Woolf (1994); and Companion to central and eastern Europe since 1989 by Adrian Webb (2008).

But most historians find it easier to focus on individual countries such as Poland.  I have, however, just come across a 1000 page study of the region which looks quite fascinating - entitled From peoples into nations – a history of Eastern Europe; by John Connelly (2020) reviewed here and with an interview here. 

2. Always a sucker for intellectual history, I liked the look of The Ideas Industry – how pessimists, partisans and plutocrats are transforming the marketplace of ideas; Daniel Drezner (2017). I used to dislike the American habit of long self-explanatory titles but now find it a fairly useful guide around the crap which deluges the conscientious reader. 

3. And always wanting to find texts which try to penetrate the souls of nations, I am intrigued with Bending Adversity; Japan and the art of survival by David Pilling (2014) which I found in my local English bookshop last week. Pilling was the lead journalist for the Financial Times for 8 years from 2001 but returned in March 2011 to cover the Tsunami events.   

His take complements superbly the very thorough study published recently by Edinburgh academic Chris Harding “Japan Story – in search of a nation 1850 to the present” (2018) which I am half-way through. It’s an easy read and particularly strong on social and cultural vignettes…. 

4. Donald Sassoon is one of these amazing writers who tries to do justice to an entire subject in one large volume. The history of European Socialism and European culture are two of the issues he has tackled - and his latest is a 700 page tome (with 170 of the pages being bibliography and notes) - “Anxious Triumph – the global history of capitalism 1860-1914” (2019); It’s reviewed here and here

It may be forbidding in size – but it has an engrossing style….It’s lying here on the table awaiting my attention 

5. Rethinking governance – the centrality of the state in modern society by S Bell and A Hindmoor (2009) is another book with a title I find appealing… 

At its simplest, the arguments that governments have been ‘hollowed out’ or ‘decentred’ and must now work with a range of non-state actors in order to achieve their goals…… are overblown. In fact, part of the motivation for writing this book was the lack of a sustained alternative account of governance in which the state played a central role in governance arrangements and relationships, but also steered or metagoverned them. Although we point to instances in which governments have been marginalised and collectively valued policy goals are being pursued by non-state actors, such cases are few and far between. 

In our view governments and the broader set of agencies and public bodies which together constitute the state are and should remain central in governance processes.

But while rejecting what we call ‘society-centred’ arguments about governance, we also express reservations about alternative ‘state-centric’ accounts in which governments are imagined to operate in splendid isolation from the societies they govern, descending from on high occasionally to impose their policy preferences.

Instead, we develop a ‘state-centric relational’ account of governance, arguing that states have enhanced their capacity to govern by strengthening their own institutional and legal capacities but also by developing closer relations with non-state actors 

6. Bill Mitchell is a leftist Australian economist whose Reclaiming the State – a progressive vision of sovereignty in a post neo-liberal world (2017) I’m trying to find the time to at least skim. He’s also one of the proponents of Modern Monetary Theory I’m trying to get my head around. The US Dissent magazine ran a dissenting article here…   

7. Rentier Capitalism – who owns the economy and who pays for it? By Brett Christophers (2020) is an epub book which looks another must-read! 

8. Adam Tooze is one of these polymaths whose skills I envy and admire – graduating as an economist, he then got a doctorate in economic history from Berlin University and the LSE and became Professor of modern German history at Yale - focusing on its economic aspects and producing impressive books on first economic aspects of the Nazi regime and then the definitive account of the global financial meltdown (“Crashed – how a decade of financial crises changed the world”). He has blogged about different aspects of the book  https://adamtooze.com/2018/06/23/framing-crashed-1-trade-and-finance-two-different-visions-of-the-twenty-first-century-global-condition/ 

He is a prolific journalist and produces a regular economics newsletter – Chartbook - which is the best briefing on economic issues I know. The latest issue looks at Bitcoin

If everyone has rights, no one has them

This is the paradox which I am increasingly forced to consider. I started well – protesting at school against the massacre and exploitation of African workers in what was then a British colony; and campaigning against poor housing conditions. These were the late 1950s and 60s – when Penguin books were publishing their great series on “What’s Wrong with Britain?” lambasting British institutions as not fit for purpose.

But I then got stuck on what would, these days, be called class issues and was, for example, no great enthusiast for the campaign against “the glass ceiling” - which I saw as an issue for already privileged women…. 

Slowly, however, a hitherto “deferential” society was changing and asserting itself. The traditional authority of bodies such as the church, state, monarch and elites was challenged – not least with the weapons of ridicule and satire. And, oddly, one of the greatest challengers to that traditional respect and authority in the 1980s was no less a figure than the Conservative Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher who launched an astonishing and sustained attack not only on the trade unions but the legal and academic establishments…..Everything needed to change…to be open to scrutiny – with the Freedom of Information (FoI) legislation being enacted in the year 2000

What few of us saw at the time was the effects of this new critical spirit on social cohesion. 

A new little industry has become that of plotting public trust in various profession and institutions. The results are worrying - 

Since the mid-1960s, public trust in government and political institutions has been decreasing in all of the advanced industrialized democracies. Although the pattern and the pace of the decrease are dissimilar across countries, the downward trend is ubiquitous. Except for the Netherlands, which actually shows increased trust in the government from the 1970s until the mid-1990s, all of the other advanced industrialized democracies recorded a decline in the level of trust their respective governments have enjoyed. Austrians pointed to the collapse of collectivist consensus as the main culprit of declining trust in government. Canadians blamed the continuing tensions on nationalism and separatism in the country. Germans attributed their malaise to the strains of unification, while the Japanese condemned the consecutive political scandals and the long economic recession of the 1990s.

Even the Swedes and the Norwegians, generally associated with high degree of trust in politics, became distrustful of their political institutions in the 1990s….

Open and critical inquiry is the mark of a civilized nation…..is it not? Who can possibly gainsay that?

It’s surely only old fuddy-duddies who could argue otherwise? People like David Brooks – whose book “The Road to Character” I looked at not so long ago – just after I had been deeply impressed by another small book called On Thinking Institutionally by Hugh Heclo (2008)

Pages 18-20 of Heclo’s book is a timeline which explains the development of political distrust in the USA   

In the last 60 years our education system has designated institutions as, at best, annoying encumbrances and, at worst, oppressive tools of the past. Students are taught to believe what they like and express themselves as they see fit. 

Even people understood to be conservatives—at least in the way we conceptualize political ideology today—assail institutions. Free market economics places a premium on self-interest and assumes institutions stifle innovation and entrepreneurship.
 But institutions provide reference points in an uncertain world. They tie us to the past and present; furnish personal assistance; and institutionalize trust. They give our lives purpose and, therefore, the kind of self-satisfaction that only the wholesale rejection of them is supposed to provide. 

How, then, do we protect and promote them? I must confess that, much as I wanted to understand his arguments, I found it difficult to summarise them clearly. He clearly wants to move our focus away from the self and towards a recognition of our debts and obligations to others. To “think institutionally” is to do something much more than provide individuals with incentives to be part of and promote institutions - it rather calls on them to modify their behaviour. Heclo argues that acting institutionally has three components.

-       The first, "profession," involves learning and respecting a body of knowledge and aspiring to a particular level of conduct.

-       The second, "office," is a sense of duty that compels an individual to accomplish considerably more for the institution than a minimal check-list of tasks enumerated within a kind of job description. 

-       Finally, there is "stewardship." Here Heclo is getting at the notion of fiduciary responsibility. The individual essentially takes the decisions of past members on trust, acts in the interests of present and future members, and stands accountable for his actions.

I have some sympathy for this line of argument – against “the quick buck”…. instant gratification….. tomorrow’s headlines…..we need cultures which respect partnership, timescales for investment and the idea of “stewardship” which Robert Greenleaf tried, unsuccessfully, to cultivate…..The quotation, indeed, which graces the first page of my Dispatches to the post-capitalist generation is from Dwight Eisenhower’s last address in 1960 

We . . . must avoid the impulse to live only for today, plundering for our own ease and convenience the precious resources of tomorrow. We cannot mortgage the material assets of our grandchildren without risking the loss also of their political and spiritual heritage. We want democracy to survive for all generations to come, not to become the insolvent phantom of tomorrow.

Heclo’s book, I concede, is in the tradition of Edmund Burke and Michael Oakeshott and tended to attract the attention of clerics and university administrators – some of whom produced this interesting symposium 

The trouble, however, is that “possessive individualism” has such a grip on us all that these arguments no longer seem to have any traction. Although I’ve just noticed that another conservative has just published a book which tries to build on Heclo’s much-neglected book - “A Time to Build” Yuval Levin (2020)