Sofia City Gallery scores again!

The Sofia City Art Gallery has put together another excellent exhibition – this time to honour the memory of the Bulgarian Association of New Artists which was active from 1931 to after 1944. Founded in Sofia, its objective was to unite artists with similar aesthetic viewpoints who espoused new trends in art in keeping with movements in western Europe in the 1920s and 1930s. Although its first members worked primarily in a realistic manner, around 1936—when membership had grown to 55—other Bulgarian artists who had studied and worked in Paris, Munich and Vienna joined its ranks. Artists such as Alexandar Zhendov, BENCHO OBRESHKOV, Boris Eliseev, Vera Nedkova, David Perets, Eliezer Alshekh, IVAN NENOV, Kiril Petrov and KIRIL TSONEV contributed more modernist approaches, rejecting academic art, folkloric elements and especially the ideas of Social Realism put into practice by the founders of the Society. An internet review said its members created works with a „sophisticated approach to style, a purity of form and a stable internal structure”. But this sort of jargon doesn’t tell me anything – and I have to say that, much as I appreciate this insight into the historical developments of Bulgarian painting and the imaginative way the City Gallery has dealt with it (with blow-ups of the agonised press receptions of the time addorning the gallery’s pillars), this is not a genre which particularly appeals to me. But I was deeply impressed with the graphics of Vesselin Staikov and the work of Ivan Penkov and Bronka Gyurova. After 1944 the New Artists’ Society was absorbed by the Union of Bulgarian Artists . Many of those who had been members of the Society were declared ‘bourgeois artists’ by the Communist regime and were no longer able to take part in exhibitions; several, including Alshekh, Elisev and Perets, emigrated.
The frequency of these special exhibitions at the City Gallery (which always borrow works from the country’s regional galleries) contrasts so favourably with the lack of imagination shown by the National Gallery just across the road which never changes its permanent exhibition and rarely puts on worthwhile specials (I do remember a great tanev exhibition they mounted a year or so ago. The National Gallery charges about 5 euros – and the City Gallery is free. Therein lies a lessons about the better service generally offered by local government!
The graphic is one of Vesselin Staikov's at the exhibition. In addition to engravings with themes from nature, old towns and mountain villages, Staikov produced a cycle of engravings on the modern city: Sofia with its modern architecture, the clearing of rubble after the air-raids and the construction of new houses and buildings. The artist is also fond of doing ancient, strangely shaped trees. Labour themes occupy an important place in Staikov’s work. He shows love and understanding for the worker, the peasant. Some engravings reflect the romanticism of Bulgarian scenery and architecture, others – the primitive force and ruggedness of the village landscape. .

Britain and Europe

A year ago, my blog rose to a challenge to name the 50 books to keep in one’s library if forced to reduce it to 50 books My basic criteria were (a) the light thrown on the European dilemmas of the last century and (b) the quality of the language and the book as a whole. There’s nothing I would really want to change in the entry. I did, however, leave 6 vacant places – and should now consider if any of the books I have read in 2011 might be added to the list.
And the 10th December post of last year celebrated, on my dad’s birth day, some of the values of his generation which are, today, sorely missed.

The British veto at last week’s EU summit is shocking both for what it represents - the protection of financial sector interests by a political cabinet whose members are funded by these financial parasites; and for the marginalisation it augurs for the country. The Guardian has a useful overview which makes the point that this is the culmination of both daft recent political decisions (such as the Conservative withdrawal a couple of years ago from the European People’s Party, the umbrella group in the European Parliament for the parties which dominate so many European governments these days) and the incomprehending and hostile attitude of so many of the old British political class to Europeans. A friend sent me recently Thomas Kremer’s 2005 book The Missing Heart of Europe which explains much of this mutual incomprehension -

The engineers of the EU are deaf to the rising clamour of national identities as they are blind to the profound continent’s diversity of economic and political cultures. within the continent. Therein lies the breathtaking arrogance of their profession. The fatal assumption all along has been that member states are similar, and that national national diversity does not matter and can be over-ridden by negotiations in a closed political circle. within the confines of a narrow bureaucratic and political circle. But it is precisely this diversity that determines just how far, how fast and how deep European European integration can be.is possible.
Europe’s faultline does not lie in the middle of the English Channel. Across the continent it separates those countries with an eccentric heritage, where power emanates from the grass roots and authority is vested in the individual, from those with a concentric tradition, where power is centralised and the corporate state predominates. The confrontation between France and Britain is not about €3bn ($3.7bn), or integration, or the visceral dislike of two leaders or about reigniting historical rivalries. It is more profound than that.
What makes Britain eccentric is the organic development of its parliamentary democracy; its trade-based maritime expansion; a rich, flexible , multi-rooted and near grammar-less language; a pragmatic approach to life and philosophy; the common law; an anti-authoritarian spirit; an all-pervasive and irreverent humour; an unwritten , rolling constitution; reliance on individual initiative; commercial enterprise and an attitude of easygoing carelessness.
What makes France concentric is almost the exact opposite. It moved from a successful absolutist rule to an uneasy democracy by episodic revolutions; it achieved its pre-eminence through a land mass expansion; the grammar of its language is sophisticated with a vocabulary jealously guarded by an august academic body; its philosophy is steeped in great ideals with logic preferred to common sense; its monarchies, empires and republics are distinguished by a rich tapestry of often rewritten constitutions; it draws heavily on formal, written procedures inherent in Roman law rather than live evidence and courtroom drama; its people defernaturally, if with some resentment, to the authority of the state; a n economic reliance on state-supported enterprises and a fine-honed bureaucracy that governs life through manifold regulations that its citizens have learnt to circumvent.
In critical respects the Nordic countries, the Netherlands, the Czech Republic and along with Britain are eccentric while Germany, Spain and together with France form the concentric core of the continent.

During the 80s I had a lot of experience of working with European colleagues – in at the founding of the French-led Organisation for Traditional Industrial Regions (RETI), for example, and a member of Dutch and Italian led- networks which produced reports on the experience of urban participation and innovation in Europe. I was also one of the British representatives on the Council of Europe’s Standing Conference of Local and Regional Authorities for some 4 years. Even with my French and German languages, I would get pretty impatient with the posturing and rhetoric of my continental colleagues! But this was one of the things we contributed to Europe - puncturing the hot air of the overpaid Eurocrats and federalists. Critical as I am of the New Labour Governments, its Ministers made a positive contribution to European developments and earned respect. But the upper class twits who now form the Conservative political class have barely altered their attitude to foreigners in 100 years - and are sadly supported by many nationalistic working class English whose tribal emotions have been touched by the immigration of the past 4 decades. Cameron and his team have been steadily alienating European leaders with their comments and behaviour - and this was probably the personal pay-off.
Having said all that, however, some of the reactions to Cameron's veto are probably a bit extreme. And this article - 10 myths about Cameron's EU Veto - is an important challenge to the Guardian newspaper line. But probably the most continuously insightful blog on the UK position in all these negotiations is the Bagehot one in The Economist journal. However, the best single comment is probably this blogger with diplomatic experience.

Most of my working experience in the past 20 years has been with Dutch or German-led consortia. I got on well with the former - although the German bureaucracy did get to me! However, my worst (sourest and most pedantic)boss was an English woman lawyer who headed the TAIEX office in the 90s which arranged trips for technocrats in EU and aspiring countries in the pursuit of theie future compliance with EU regulations. That office also gave me a real insight into the operation of European civil servants - who devoted their enrgies to in-fighting(the real work was done by those on short-term contracts); and left the office early - secure in the knowledge that they couldn't be sacked.

Britain has been in steady decline all my adult life. The 60s were the years of diagnosis; the 70s of experimentation – with 1979 as a landmark when even the Labour government lost its faith in Keynesianism. The next 3 decades of Thatcherism and Bliarism seemed to many at the time to be giving Britain a new lease of life – but is belatedly being recognised as a disastrous abandonment of its basic industries and encouragement of unsustainable private debt. With the North Sea oil running out and no further benefits to be accrued by the state from privatisations, the future is bleak for the country. It is appropriate to ask how Japan coped with the melt-down it faced almost 20 years ago – and what lessons that experience contains for the UK.
Richard Koo has for some time been trying to get us to look at what that Japanese experience can tell us about the current addiction to deflation and austerityhere; here and here.
Also a video

Sofia was looking like this a few days ago. Its another new acquisition - an Ivan Petrov from the 1960s

Rethinking local services

For someone who dedicated 22 years of his life to local government - in senior political positions in local government and running, in parallel in academia, a Local Government Unit which ran workshops and published papers about issues about local government management, I write very little now about the subject. True, there are some papers on my website - about the lessons I drew from social inclusion work which took up a lot of my time and commitment between 1970 and 1990 ; about the experience of European local government in transferring functions; and a Roadmap which
I enjoyed writing in 2003-05 for those running the Kyrgyzstan system.

I have, however, watched with despair as the british system has become even more centralised in the past 2 decades – the Scottish less than the English. They seem impervious to the lessons that lie on their (European) doorstep – that decentralised systems are healthier and more able to deal with issues. The British political parties are full of the rhetoric of people power – but when in power continue to centralise. An astonishing 70% of local government spending in the UK is controlled by central government - compared with 19% in Germany and 32% in France.
I therefore stopped watching developments on that front some time ago – but seem, as a result, to have missed an interesting initiative which took place in the Brown years – something called Total place. This encouraged municipalities and local state bodies to come together; identify how much was being spent on particular problems eg drug treatment; and to rethink the services with a smaller budget. 13 pilots were selected and helped by some universities. The results seemed to be promising and give a new legitimacy and role for local government – as is seen in this final report; and handbook . The focus on clients – rather than departments – is radical and clearly could be taken seriously only because of economic and budgetary crisis. Part of its thinking can be traced back to the zero-budgeting ideas of the 1960s and 1970s and indeed I came across a comment from an interesting guy, Des McConaghy, I had contact with in those days -

it is intolerably frustrating – almost 40 years later and at 80 years of age! – seeing so many “total approach” initiatives come and go – decade after decade; each inevitably failing for much the same reasons as each new generation “starts from square one”. The landscape is strewn with their wreckage. So it’s now up to the Cabinet Office to really get to grips with the actual policy implications of localism. They must see that while this does indeed mean massively devolving all that can be safely left to the localities it also means a better grip on Whitehall’s own strategic role – plus the management and political validation of that vital constituency dimension!

However, the Handbook is a very rare celebration of systems thinking - it is very well-presented and shows how the concept and its operation draws on different strands of thinking (eg group-grid theory which I referred to recently; styles of learning; dialogue etc). It is very rare for an official document to refer to such theoretical grounding. My only beef is that there are few hard examples of the results in the Handbook. For that you have to go to the individual Final Report eg from Birmingham.
My internet search, however, suggests that the Total Place initiative seems, despite (because of?)its hype, to have disappeared without a trace with the arrival of the Coalition Government - being replaced by another pilot (this time in 2 places only) called Community Budgets. The "Prospectus" (typical business language) about the concept fails to mention the "total place" work even once. Instead, the phrase "whole-place" is used. Why do politicians need to behave so childishly?
Just what local government can offer particularly in this part of the world is nicely shown in this Local Government and Public Services book
The painting is a new acquisition - from last night's auction, It's by Grigor Naidenov who was born in Sofia in 1895 and focussed on urban life and scenes
Breaking news; The UK Deputy PM announced at the weekend that the English cities would get the chance to be free of a lot of central regulations - if, that is, he succeeded in his ongoing battle with the civil servants.

Bankers as communist nomenklatura?

In a nutshell, the governments that saved the banks and financial markets from a meltdown by borrowing huge amounts of monies are now being attacked for having too much debt by the institutions they saved.

This is just one of several arresting passages in a stimulating Open Democracy article I’ve just received and which argues that the banks have, over the past decade, broken the basic rules of lending - which normally allow only 6 pounds to be created from a single pound deposit and which ensure that 13% of every deposit is kept as a bank deposit. In its place, he argues, has been created a Ponzi scheme. The article continues -

The bankers and financiers do not own banks and financial institutions. They are owned by pension funds, saving policies and endowment policy holders, and even by governments and taxpayers. Effectively, the tax-paying middle class who saves and invests owns the financial industry which is in turn under the management of the bankers and financiers, the nomenklatura of the 21st century. And, like in the Soviet style communism system, these financial apparatchiks are not accountable to anybody but only interested in short term gains and squeezing as much as possible from anyone who has any money and cannot escape: by and large middle class taxpayers
In the 10 years leading to the collapse of 2008, the financial system abandoned the fiat currency and fractional reserve banking. This was the system wereby the money, as the store of value, was underwritten by individual countries and multiplied in a controlled way. Instead, the financiers and bankers started practicing a depleting reserve banking technique: a mechanism that replaces the currency, i.e. fiat money and legal tenders in the banks' reserves (in terms of their ratio) by papers generated by the banks themselves.

The author, Greg Pytel, has an interesting looking blog which rates second in UK blogs about corporate finance and submitted in early 2009 a damning paper to a House of Commons committee with the great title The Largest Heist in History

A Chief Executive of a Bank was one of apparently only a few who took issue with the argument and their exchange can be seen here.
Need to ask someone like Paul Mason what he makes of the argument.

The picture shows a rare painting by Alexander Bozhinov which is being auctioned soon here in Sofia. He was a one of Bulgaria's great caricaturists (whose house I lived next door to recently) but this is actually a painting he did on wood in Berlin in 1927

vegetables, books, grids and groups

The vegetable shop on the corner is the busiest shop I have ever known – although it does seem to be the older generation which uses it. Well-stocked and –frequented vegetable shops are a great feature of Sofia.
It would be interesting to know whether this healthy diet is reflected in Bulgarian health statistics…although any undoubted benefits will be swamped by the effects of smoking!
Certainly when I lived here for 18 months in 2007/2009, it made a significant (positive) difference to my cholesterol level.
So the verandah here is groaning with leeks, pears, beetroot, brocoli, gigantic parsnip, celery etc

I’m not sure if my love of reading and buying books technically qualifies me as a "bibliophile” since the dictionary defines that as "someone who loves or collects books especially as examples of fine or unusual printing or biding”. But I have always admired typface and regret that few publishers give information about the typeface used – or indeed seem to recognise that such an aesthetic consideration might actually help sell their products. I was therefore delighted to read this article which indicates that beautiful book covers are making a comeback. I also discovered that there is a website which celebrates the aesthetics of reading with the delightful name of bookporn.

Talking of books, when I looked recently at my ecological footprint, I forgot to factor in my use of Amazon books. A recent article paints a rather chilling picture of what it’s alike to work in one of their warehouses.

"Aha!" (or eureka) moments are an important but neglected part of life – when complexity and confusion momentarily clear and a strong ray of sunshine reveals a "truth”. I vividly remember that when I first read, in the 1970s, the section of Etzioni’s Social Problems which set out the stories which lay behind and sustained the individualistic, hierarchic and egalitarian perceptions and responses to social problems. The same happened in 1999 when I discovered Chris Hood's The Art of the State – rhetoric, culture and public management. This book uses Mary Douglas’grid-group theory to reduce the whole literature on admin reform to four basic schools. “Grid” denotes the degree to which our lives are circumscribed by rules – “group” indicates the extent to which we are governed by group choice. This gives a matrix of -
• Hierarchist (high on both)
• individualist (low on both)
• Egalitarian (high on group; low on grid)
• Fatalist (high on grid; low on group)

More interestingly, he then shows their typical policy responses, weaknesses and strengths. Sadly, neither the Etzioni nor Hood book is available on google – although this article by Hood demonstrates the use which can be made of the typology. The link I've given ábove for Mary Douglas is actually a very interesting piece in which she reflects on the origins of her theory - and how it developed. It's rare that one gets such an insight into a concept's origins and development from the author. Too often and too quickly concepts become reified.

I had another "aha!" moment when I found recently The case for clumsiness which, again, sets out the various stories which sustain the different positions people take us on various key policy issues – such as the environment. There is a good interview with the author here and a short summary here

Rediscovery of political economy

I have referred several times to the radical rethinking of the economics discipline and also of psychology and regretted that there was little sign of such reassessment of basic principles in the schools of management – let alone in those of public management which continue to regurgitate so many of the hoary myths of management from the surreal world of management writing.
In fact, I now realise, some people – in and around The World Bank of all places – have been engaged in some basic reappraisals of relevant literature for administrative reform efforts and producing some very readable documents. They are those associated with the World Bank’s recent Governance Reforms under real world conditions written around the central questions for my work as a consultant -
1. How do we build broad coalitions of influentials in favour of change? What do we do about powerful vested interests?
2. How do we help reformers transform indifferent, or even hostile, public opinion into support for reform objectives?
3. How do we instigate citizen demand for good governance and accountability to sustain governance reform?

I realise I keep repeating these questions (and the reference) but the questions are so rarely asked in practice let alone pursued seriously in transition countries - and the book is quite excellent. This morning, the WB drew my attention to three useful bits of training material to back up that work.
Interestingly, the displines they draw on are political economy and communications. Both are dear to my heart – the first being the neglected Scottish intellectual tradition which was (just) still alive in my university days - although this useful paper from the Asian development Bank on the subject credits the first use of the term to a 17th century Frenchman. This paper from the ODI gives examples of its use to ensure that development interventions are on a firm basis.

A new website offers an advance copy of an article on an overdue subject – corporate psychopaths and their role in the global crisis.

Pursuing ones passions

For some time, I’ve been fascinated that my most popular post by far is the one from a year ago entitled "adversarial and consensual systems” which has been viewed almost 600 times without any prompting on my part – 130 of these in the last month.
The post actually gives an account of what I would call the "catholicism" of my approach to life (I don’t understand how this word can also have this meaning of "breadth”) - and the number of times this led me into bipartisan activity which never went down well with my immediate political colleagues.

It’s actually highly ironic that, at age 26, I was elevated by my political colleagues to the post of Secretary of the Labour group on the municipality since my commitment (in both practice and writing) to community development challenged the whole edifice of political parties. Two years later I also took the post of Chairman of the recently established Social Work authority – which allowed me to pursue an agenda of what we now call inclusiveness at both a neighbourhood and town level. I suppose they gave me my head since the energy and openness I showed reflected well on a party which had become somewhat moribund.
I used the experience to found a Local Government Unit in the nearby College where I lectured; wrote papers; and organised workshops about the new promise of corporate management and community development. Quite a recipe! And it positioned me well when a large and powerful Region was created in 1974 covering half of Scotland.
By then, my work had made me an interesting and familiar figure to the councillors who made up the controlling Labour group on the new Region – and I was again selected to act as the Secretary, one of 4 leadership positions. Elections to that position were held every two years – and I managed to hold the post until my resignation 16 or so years later. Again I was given my head on matters of social inclusion (we called it multiple deprivation then) and brought a whole new set of community- and policy-based structures into existence – as well as starting the support for social enterprise (community business as we called it).
Those were the days in which national government largely left us alone in local government – and we were left to blaze trails. Local government since then has become very boring in the UK with municipalities press-ganged to serve the latest central government wheeze.

But the power base of the empires of Education, Roads etc was never threatened by all this activity. And I was too much the loner – working with allies in officialdom, community groups etc, writing papers for national journals rather than spending the necessary time in the smoke-filled rooms with indifferent or hostile colleagues who chaired these sorts of committess and were in cahoots with their Directors. A paper on my website summarises the 16-year experience of developing and managing these policies – and the lessons I found myself drawing in the early 1990s (thanks to a fellowship the Glasgow-based Urban Studies magazing gave me in 1996)

And then, one day in late October 1990, I found myself on the North Sea on a ferry to Copenhagen, beginning a completely new life as a technocratic adviser in central europe – supposed to be helping them build up government systems. It would be nice to say that the commitments and insights of my earlier life have informed my new life of the past 20 years – but this has rarely been the case. Although the early work in central europe was with local government systems, I steadily moved to national government issues – particularly relating to the establishment of a more meritocratic civil service. All the time I was learning as mch as advising – particularly about how other European countries operated (fortunately I had developed good European networks in the 1980s). My great success was in Azerbaijan of all places – in setting up a Civil Service Agency which is still going strong.
But the last 6 years have focussed on training systems and programmes. I don’t pretend to be an expert on this subject – but my background has given me the confidence to challenge some of the sloppy thinking I encounter in this field. Recent blogposts have tried to summarise these thoughts – and I am now trying to integrate these with a paper I wrote in 2008. The results I hope to put on the website soon.

So I have been a very lucky man – free (and paid) to pursue my passions. It’s one of the reasons I feel unable to offer advice to young people. Apart from the fact that these are much more difficult times, I just happened to be in (or manoeuvre myself into) the right place at the right time.

This blog has been a useful focus in the past 2 years for my thoughts and reading. But I have probably reached the point when I need to be more disciplined. One of the blogs I admire posts only every Wednesday – and this is perhaps a format I should be thinking of.