Under the Table: Transparency International Report ‘Reveals Endemic Global Corruption!’

Global Corruption Barometer 2013: 59% of respondents in 17 #G20 nations state their govts 'are not doing a good job fighting corruption' #TI

— ッ MEDIOLANA® EDU (@Mediolana) July 11, 2013

55% of respondents believe their government is run by lobbyists; 91%/ #Indians rate government anti-corruption measures as '(v.)ineffective'

— ッ MEDIOLANA® EDU (@Mediolana) July 11, 2013

66%/Brazilian respondents believe special interest groups have 'somewhat or full control of the reins of government' http://t.co/4OPoCzWxc6

— ッ MEDIOLANA® EDU (@Mediolana) July 11, 2013

The Moral Question of Democracy: Really Intelligent Governance for the Twenty-First Century

As regular readers of this blog will have no hesitation in attesting to, in the eyes of our CSO the Financial Times is fast-becoming not merely the United Kingdom’s newspaper of record, but increasingly the only such periodical which does not function as an emetic. Gillian Tett – one of the FT’s most thought-provoking and consistently interesting columnists – provided further justification for this viewpoint in her most recent article, Chinese Lessons for America (5th/6th January 2013).

Citing the Nicolas Berggruen and Nathan Gardels instant classic Intelligent Governance for the 21st Century: A Middle Way Between West and East (Polity Press, 2012), Tett notes that there is now a significant mass of disenchantment with the established political order in Western democracies, and not merely at the grassroots level; Berggruen and Gardels’ prescription – that countries such as the United States adopt a more meritocratic, technocratic and managerial approach to governance, albeit one tempered by a measure of direct, highly participatory democracy, is  certainly worthy of consideration.

Yet are the problems that are now all too evident in what was, up until recently, unquestioningly classified as the developed world, really remediable by tinkering with (or even overhauling) the political structures of individual countries? While genuine improvements to a given constitutional order may be more or less welcomed, we feel that the real issue – that those in charge of liberal democracies have not read their Fukuyama – is being ignored. In his seminal The End of History and the Last Man (1992), Francis Fukuyama is at pains to point out that liberal democracy, while an evolutionary ideological end-point, is not self-sustaining via liberal principles alone. The most perfect constitution imaginable will mean nothing in a polity populated by utility-maximising ‘barbarians’ (or ‘adult beasts’, to adduce Fukuyama) incapable of anything other than endless curation of already-created culture (and perhaps not even this).

In short, the moral question of democracy – the force that compels a judge to refuse a bribe, the inner voice that dissuades a politician from exploiting his intern, the bureaucratic decision to construct a metro line instead of yet another road to be clogged by cars – has yet to be fully answered. The devotion or otherwise of resources towards resolving this problem may yet determine the very future of governance itself.

An Englishman in New York: Alessio Rastani on the Global Democratic Deficit

When Alessio Rastani first burst into global consciousness on 26th September 2011 following an instant classic of an interview on the normally moribund BBC News channel, he was variously dismissed as a plant, a comedian or a fake by the more credulous sections of the British mass media who seemed to be in collective denial over the influence that certain elements of the financial industry exert over key political and regulatory actors. Yet we at Mediolana knew that the iconic independent trader – a category of professional that trades their own money, rather than resorting to institutionalised gambling of the general population’s assets – was very much the real deal: a rare percipient voice in a sea of hypocritical verbiage; someone to take very seriously indeed.

And the international media agreed with us. Appearances on CNN and Al Jazeera merely reaffirmed Rastani’s credentials as an opinion-maker of genuine import; his detailed evaluations of the overall health and stability of the global financial system are – unlike the actions of the plutocratic classes in much of the developed world – likely to be judged favourably by historians.

Yet as an interview with New York’s global youth culture bible Elan Magazine amply demonstrates, the Italo-Iranian’s insights are not confined to all matters financial. Riffing effortlessly on subjects from the flaws in the world’s financial architecture to the necessity for intellectual investment by traders and citizens more generally, Rastani signed off with a sobering observation that will give the world of political science something to think about: ‘I really doubt…that any true democracy exists in the world we live…a lot of the protests [such as Occupy Wall Street] are just about frustration with the system as it is right now. It’s not just about banks and bonuses. It’s about the fact that nothing really is changing. No matter who will elect, no matter who we put in power, it’s the same old stuff.’

This gave us pause for thought. It has been observed – not least by Francis Fukuyama, author of the seminal The End of History and the Last Man – that the world as a whole has been heading towards a consensus that democracy is the best form of governance; as the novelist and filmmaker Charles Michel Duke has observed, rare today is the newly-independent state that decides to be a monarchy rather than a republic.

Yet as superior as democracy may be to the alternatives, no human system is perfect. The best laws can be abrogated or ignored, public servants can be subject to regulatory capture, spurious states of emergency can be engendered and technology can make a mockery of equity. The health of even the best-designed system is to a large degree contingent on the ethics of the people who populate it: no form of governance can legislate for morality. And as Rastani notes in his recent article Are Traders Greedy Psychopaths?, cultures do not arise from nowhere: they are created and sustained by populations. If our system of governance is dysfunctional, it may say much more about ourselves than we are willing to admit.

Is Turkey the new blueprint for the Middle East?

With the world’s attention focused on the spectacular crumbling of autocracy in Tunisia, it may be difficult for many to believe that a process of potentially even greater long-term significance for the advance of democracy is well underway in the Middle East, and without a bullet being fired: the writing of a new constitution in Turkey.

Turkey has emerged seemingly from nowhere in the last decade to  become, in the words of British Prime Minister David Cameron, ‘Europe’s BRIC‘; Cameron’s words seem prescient as Jim O’Neill, the chairman of Goldman Sachs Asset Management who coined the ‘BRIC’ acronym, considers Turkey a member of the ‘growth markets‘ group of countries which is superseding his original neologism. The World Bank estimates that the Turkish economy grew by a stunning 8.1% in recession-soaked 2010, and with impressive infrastructural improvements in evidence in and between major cities throughout Turkey – including the mushrooming of new universities from Istanbul to Erzincan – it is clear that the country is undergoing some kind of transformation.

The Turkish Republic has also undertaken some significant democratic reforms under the ruling Justice and Development Party since the latter swept to office in 2002. These changes have not always proceeded consistently or speedily, but in 2011 the drafting of a new constitution will assume centre stage. Turkey’s Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan recently stated that constitution would be authored by a broad spectrum of society and that it would be characterised by brevity, accessibility and substantiveness: ‘I envision a short text that targets advanced democracy, that ensures freedoms and fundamental rights and that is understandable.’ Umit Boyner, the charismatic leader of TUSIAD, the main Turkish industrialists’ association, has stated that her organisation will release a report on the deficiencies of Turkish democracy on 1st March; this publication is likely to be highly influential.

These developments are potentially of extraordinary significance. For a variety of cultural and diplomatic reasons, EU candidate Turkey presently possesses tremendous clout in much of the Middle East; if it can adopt a new constitution which is in keeping with democratic best practice, this could well spur publics throughout the region to ask why they are not being afforded the same rights.

Tunisia: the first domino or an Arab aberration?

Novelist-turned-filmmaker Charles Michel Duke recently blogged about events in the Maghreb, posing the fascinating question of whether other Arab publics may follow Tunisia’s example of ‘regime change’.

While it is difficult to predict these things with any precision, this issue seems to illustrate as much as anything else the problems with treating the Arab world as monolithic bloc. Tunisia, while in some ways better administered than many developing countries, contained numerous ingredients that made popular revolt more likely: a much-disliked head of state; an educated, young population which is struggling to perceive a prosperous future; and endemic human rights abuses.

Prima facie, it may seem that some other Arab countries share one or more of these attributes, but the reality on the ground is far more complex. For example, while Kuwait is many respects heavily-centralised and autocratic, it vaunts one of the most lavish welfare states anywhere on earth: this is, after all, a country where the government regularly cancels consumer debt incurred by its citizens. While the Jordanian people are experiencing austerity, in Queen Rania they possess one of the very few world leaders who is almost universally admired.

In all likelihood, change in Arabic-speaking countries – much like elsewhere in the world – is most likely to happen where the public have little incentive to support the status quo and where, like a Fry and Laurie sketch, things are truly grey and hopeless: ruling classes with legitimacy crises, chronic unemployment, plummeting standards of living and a paucity of basic freedoms. Perhaps the most significant thing about the Jasmine Revolution is that a region that many associate with all that is retrocessionary has begun to become synonymous with a kind of change that even ten days ago seemed beyond the realms of possibility.