Thomas P.M. Barnett :: Weblog

"crafty politicians and their supporters use the management and control of rule sets to keep power, expand power and certainly keep most of the fruits of the economy going there way. This dynamic can really work against change in these countries. There will probably be very strong resistance to changing the rules set IF it looks like they will undermine the current holders of power or regimes. How do we do this then?"

This si the problem in Gap countries. The one I am most familiar with is Kenya, which has a kleptocracy based on tribal connections. IMHO until a reasonably honest government is in place, pouring in money and other goodies is an exercise in futility as the kleptocrats just steal the goodies.

I know the Philippines but haven't been there for many years. All countries that were colonized by Spain, Portugal, and France work on a system of graft. It's a bad system, but things can be accomplished because the power holders can usually be bought off.

If we can succeed in helping Iraq and Afghanistan install reasonably honest, competent governments they may be good models/examples for other Gap countries. But it is going to take time for that to happen.

If you say "sucks to be you" to the local elites, you will lose or at least win far more slowly than necessary. Disintermediation is not the end of the story. They have a next generation to put on top of the greasy pole and they can put a lot of sticks in your spokes if you don't give them something. I was having this argument in 1995/1996 on soc.culture.romania and the best carrot for local elites is the recognition that they're probably a rough cognitive elite and thus are going to do well in the new world and that new world is going to have a much bigger pie. Local elites will accept disintermediation if they see that the old ways lead to a shrinking pie or that the new ways will lead to fast enough growth that their family/clan/tribe will improve their position over sticking to the tried and true.

This dynamic is still playing out in Romania. Eventually there needs to be the creation of internal reform forces that want connectivity for its own sake but manna from the EU is currently largely driving reform. How to change states from externally led motivation to internal is a, currently unsolved, issue in my mind.

Hi Tom,
For what it is worth, I think I finally get it. Thanks.
TM,
I am not even sure this is correct: "How to change states from externally led motivation to internal is a, currently unsolved, issue in my mind."
They are lead from the inside, or their dreams, not that which are the riches of their countries. A perturbation destroys implicit laws not explicit laws. After these implicit laws are destroy, there needs to be explicit laws in place to control the implicit laws of what follows. I think you can solve it by thinking what internally motivates these guys and work backwards from there. Rape is not about sex, it is about power, or control of power. These corrupt leaders are thinking internally not externally when they rape their own countries.

When the subject of disintermediating local elites is raised, I always think of America's own Gap, the largely unconnected black underclass.

Like Russia, France and China, there are folks in this country who are not able to do all that well in open competition so they prefer to operate in a Gap environment with the assistance of local elites. So far, it has proved to be a resilient system that has successfully resisted most attempts at change.

One of the interesting results of Huricane Katrina was the dispersal of one of these Gap areas into the wider American society. A sort of Gulf Coast Big Bang. The New Orleans political elite is going to have to deal with a returning population that has been experiencing some unmediated connectivity and might be less content to be ruled by kleptocrats than they were before 2005.

Larry - The internal rulesets of Romania are a hodgepodge of colonial systems, Austro-Hungarian, Russian, and Turkish. Given that Bucharest is the capital, the Turkish tends to predominate. The ottoman colonial system, at least as practiced locally was always all about rape. You paid a huge bribe to get to power and you extracted huge taxes (raping the countryside) to pay back the money you borrowed to get there plus tribute or a war tax (depending on local correlation of forces). Thus the old romanian phrase "domni cu domni si noi ne vedem de treaba" (the lords with the lords and we'll see to the work). No matter which lords are on top, it was always rape and somebody had to stick around to make the bed for the next round.

Talk to a romanian politico and advance the line that Romania should reform itself so that it does better than the EU. You'll be surprised by the response, I think. The most forward minded that I find have a half-cooked idea that they'll normalize on EU standards of crookedness and sham democracy and only then will it be possible to try to aim for honest government.

Most romanian political thought at the present moment has internalized the meme that the EU is a corrupt and dishonest ruleset but that it is better than what we (Romania) have now which is a corrupt, dishonest, and unsustainable ruleset. Romania generally perceives itself moving from fast sinking ship to slowly sinking ship and has a consensus on moving to from Gap/Seam to backsliding Core. Try to build a case for going direct to honest government and you get the "boy are *you* naive" look. It's beyond them to conceive of being another Ireland, bucking the EU trend with low unemployment and high growth.

What I've been getting at is trying to shortcut from A (profound corruption, bad rulesets, little integration) to B (integration, plenty of corruption and a semi-sham democracy where parties outside the consensus are hounded off the political battlefield) to C (small, honest governments that are sustainable over the long run) so it's A to C. Is B obligatory?

TM
“Is B obligatory?”
The short answer is no. I tend to look at things as a flow of energy. Maybe B looks like a natural flow or progression, but I think what it really represents is the flow of least resistance. While B looks like the path of least resistance, it is only an illusion. The path of least resistance is actually a steady flow and not a stop/start, little-bit-as-we-go, plan as B suggests.

Actually the path to failure is through B. Resistance tells us how much friction there is to a movement. Friction is the movement of objects, which are moving apart and accelerating towards each other at the same time. We tend to think of acceleration only as a change in velocity. Acceleration is also a change in direction.

So, these two objects (one for totalitarian rule and the other for democracy) represent different objects moving apart, but these objects, together, are also moving the country in a different direction. The way I have defined it, the moving-the-country-in-a-different-direction is acceleration. The two objects plus acceleration are producing friction, which determines the resistance the movement has. Because the acceleration part of the movement can happen at zero velocity (the velocity of a ball at its apex after being tossed into the air is zero even though its acceleration is 9.81m/s2), there are two kinds of friction, static and kinetic. The resistance is greater depending on which type of friction you have. When friction goes kinetic (when velocity is greater than zero and the country is making a change) the friction is less, so resistance is less. When friction is static (there is potential for change but no change has occurred) the friction is at it greatest and so is resistance. Resistance is the greatest killer of dreams.

What this means to me is that if you want to move from totalitarian rule (or corrupt rule) to democracy, you let the potential for the movement to build (reach its greatest level) and create, as close as possible, the final product (Democracy, non-corrupted country). Other wise, to overcome static friction, you will need to build the same potential for each step B you go through. On the other hand, if you bypass B and use kinetic friction during the entire movement, you will encounter less resistance, overall, to the final change.

Iraq is a good example of how to build the greatest resistance to a movement. By tearing down all the infrastructure, security, money, resources, and rule sets; we created a massive amount of static friction in the effort to rebuild these structures. If we had brought in our own rule sets and created a transparency between all other elements (money, resources, infrastructure, security) the overall resistance would have been mostly kinetic resistance; static resistance would have only been encountered during the initial change. Once the change occurred we probably would have encountered an insurgency, but the change, itself, would have been in place and the need to fight static friction at each stage of development would have been eliminated.

I am not suggesting that the outcome would have been different in Iraq; it is war after all. I am suggesting that each time we have had to stop and rebuild something (rule sets, money, resources, infrastructure, security), the resistance to change has been as great as it was during the initial combat. I am sure our dream (if anyone even thought about it in those terms) was not to build an Islamic Democracy much like Iran’s, but this seems to be happening.

Resistance is a killer of dreams. So I would say if you want to change Romania, build the potential for the change, rule-sets for after the change, and transparency to tie both together. Then when you make the change, make it as quick and complete as possible to avoid the greatest amount of resistance as possible.

The rule-sets created for after-the-changes are explicit rules. The different ethnic groups you mention represent to me different implicit rule-sets, which don’t seem to completely disappear even after assimilation into a society. Explicit rules are interpreted differently according to your own implicit laws. Everyone brings a certain bias to the table, so to speak. That is why there is a call to standardize the rule-sets. Standard rules make no one happy, but usually a consensus can be agreed upon eventually. Standardization along with greater communication, conversation, and transparency need to be built into the process of rule-set building in Romania and much of the world, to say the least.