Politicians and the chattering classes love Equilibrium. Equilibrium is good, instability is not.
They often have a point. Not too much good comes out of heavy political instability. Unless it is the overthrow of a bad regime or tyrant, in which particular case it isn’t unstableness but ‘people power’.
But what’s steadiness? Many things are stable until they are not. A place being eaten by termites looks fine and imposing till the instant it falls down.
Hard though it is to believe now, back in the early 1980s the West (above all of the Foreign Office itself) hailed post-Tito Yugoslavia as a “pillar of stableness in the Balkans”. On my first diplomatic posting in Belgrade (1981-84) the paralysis and foolishness of Yugoslavia’s convoluted ‘socialist self-management’ processes became ever more evident, to me at least. Yet the official policy line stayed. Yugoslavia was a “pillar of stability” and (as importantly) needed to be kept as such. The choice was inconceivable and should stay firmly unthought.
As a Consulate Young Turk in these leaden pre-email, pre-fax days I disagreed about all this inconclusively with the then Ambassador and my other frustrated bosses, plus anyone from London who might listen. They insisted that whether or not I was right and Yugoslavia faced tricky times, it might “muddle through somehow”.
That familiar formula got me thinking. What did it actually mean? Thus my very first FCO rant, in early 1984 : Yugoslavia and the ‘Muddle Through Somehow’ Speculation.
My basic point was this. The Muddle Thru Somehow (MTS) metaphor conveyed engaging assumptions :
General ideas of pragmatism ; an amount of homely confusion ; perhaps an absence of precise planning and control (“muddle”) but at least a broad sense of direction (“through” ; absence of extreme, shocking, violent or cataclysmic change.
I asserted, MTS as a concept sounded right only if it did not cover everything. To make claims that Europe had somehow muddled through World War Two, or that Japan had ‘muddled through’ Hiroshima and Nagasaki, seemed to miss something rather significant about those events. To explain, if the FCO wanted to claim that an MTS situation pertained, it required at least to consider whether some non-MTS events (for Yugoslavia another civil war or Soviet army intervention to hold up commie rule) could be trustworthy.
I so pointed to a serious likelihood of extreme non-MTS internal tensions escalating across Yugoslavia as the republican leaderships played the card of mass patriotism to direct attention from their amateurish corruption : Kosovo was a particularly likely flashpoint.
One has a weird sense of being perched on a sandcastle with the waters of economic logic slowly but surely eroding the base.
These exchanges read well now, from my standpoint. Yet it took a while for the final collapse to happen. Yugoslavia did Muddle Through Somehow. Until it did not.
Hence the core diplomatic policy puzzle : over what timescale is success measured?
One of the metaphors I employed to explain Bosnia’s issues to bemused Whitehall officers was the tall, steep sand-dune. You rush at the sand-dune and attempt to get to the top, but find yourself stuck. If only you had seen that robust tuft of grass over to the right before you made your dash! You might have reached that and attempted to pull yourself upwards. But any movement towards it or in any other direction makes you slide backwards.
From good if over-optimistic or even credulous intentions you can end up in a hopeless place, where no good move is available. This explains why the eurozone problem is so troublesome for our top policy-makers.
Eurozone leaders designed an ornate gondola for drifting affably round the sublime decay of Venice. They now find themselves swept by an unimaginable (or at the very least unheard of) current into horrible stormy seas.
The vessel is sinking! No life-jackets! The Greek can’t swim! The German is hooting that everyone tighten their belts! The Frenchman blames capitalism! The odious Brits preferred their own tacky dinghy : they watch with ruthless entertainment from choppy but still (they think) manageable waters.
Fundamentally, the eurozoners have permitted themselves to get far out of their depth. And they smugly declined to pack any safety kit.
A classic non-MTS situation. Civil servants and government big wheels round Europe for decades have been brought up to think in comfortable MTS terms. The difficulty they face in adjusting their thinking or even grasping the true nature of the issue is intolerable.
This happened in the FCO in the late 1980s as the Yugoslav house started seriously smouldering. Our then Ambassador in Belgrade wrote to London urging the case that things actually were getting major. The reply?
It actually is not important that much if the Yugoslavs fall out UK holiday-makers will just avoid Dubrovnik.
An MTS view that opened the way to many thousands of violent deaths, plus uncountable billions of UK and global taxpayers’ bucks thrown not awfully successfully at the issue. Failing to predict and plan for non-MTS is expensive,writes tagza.com.
No related posts.
