Wu Wei

The Eastern European mentality problem

Update 2008
I'm reluctant to use this phrase but others aren't, so they manage to track down the one time I wrote about it intentionally. But I see a few other "mentalities" crept in here and here (Greek) and here (British and Australian). And I guess you can see my own mentality problem in my grumbles about Life in Britain.

Update 2009
A related version of this is the EU Neighbourhood "reality" problem which I have written about here

The Eastern European mentality problem

What is it?
A phrase describing an attitude which resists change, but is used by westerners very often to describe what they regard as typical characteristics of people who have lived under communism.

What are the symptoms?
An unwillingness to change, a tendency to passive disruption or sabotage, not sharing the same assumptions about what is important in life (the need to get rich quick, to become western as quickly as possible, an unwillingness to throw out the baby with the bathwater?) Wanting Moscow (the government, the Tsar, Mother?) to solve all problems for you; not believing it is possible to have an opinion yourself on what to do next.

The requirement to provide money first then what the money is needed for will be revealed afterwards. Nothing can start until the money has appeared. The exact opposite of providing a fully researched and documented business plan with investment needs and cash flows showing how loans will be paid back.

A split personality: one a normal person, able to manage his own life (usually without drinking to excess) the other a childlike person who avoids all responsibility usually at work. Probably caused by learning to keep one’s head below the parapet, to not be shot at.

Who has it?
In my experience mainly older people. Younger people haven’t been so frustrated by the communist system, if they have known it all. And mainly men, possibly because they have had to deal with the system and have higher level posts than women. Perhaps because they have more to lose by the changes. Perhaps because women are better at dealing with contradictions and getting on with their double shift.

Who doesn’t have it?
10 years have provided the experience of real change in Eastern Europe. Many suspicious older officials have buckled down, learnt to speak English and got caught up in the general excitement of joining the EU, when finally it seemed likely to happen. The myth that it is too late to learn languages and change, has been disproved thousands of times in many countries. Of course these officials don’t become model westerners overnight, but then how many westerners are perfect either.

Do young people have it?
It seemed not, but in an enclave of Russians in Lithuania, it is alive and strong even among young people.

How do you get rid of it?
There doesn’t seem to be any known cure except extinction which doesn’t really count as a cure and takes a long time.

Why don’t all older people have it?
This is hard to answer. It’s not just ex-communists, or high level party members because many of them don’t have it.

Where does it come from?
Perhaps it stems from insecurity and an inability to understand the new rules of the game. Of course some it could be ideological, just to undermine the hated capitalism.

Documented examples

We’ll close Ignalina NPP when you have given us the money. What’s the money for? Compensation for doing something we don’t want to do. How will you pay for decommissioning otherwise? We don’t know and it’s none of your business if you’re not going to help.

But it's not only Eastern Europeans who have a mentality problem. Here is one man's own mentality problem, shared by many of us who travelled in Eastern Europe before the end of communism, from David Lodge, Thinks…..

I think I preferred Eastern Europe when it was communist and there wasn’t so much to eat, not much of anything actually, even if you were a visitor carrying hard currency…. There was a kind of bracing satisfaction to be got from exposing yourself temporarily to a life of privation. I remember walking the streets of Lodz one winter afternoon, it must have been in the seventies, in a kind of ecstasy at the total unrelieved miserableness of everything, the grimy dilapidated apartment blocks, the dirty frozen snow heaped in the gutters, the trams packed with grey-faced passengers grinding and groaning round the corners on their metal tracks, the lines of shapeless expressionless women in boots and topcoats queuing stoically outside food shops with totally empty windows and bare shelves…. It made you profoundly grateful for the British passport and airline ticket safely in your inside pocket… there’s not the same exhilarating contrast any more…

And whose fault is that?

And isn't the French and the Germans not wanting the Anglo-Saxon model of work also a mentality problem? A big irony that they are now afraid of the new Member States because they want to work harder now.

On the other hand it could be the difference between 45 years and 75 years of communism.

Cultural (Mis)Understandings

Bits of paper
In my old bits of paper kept from work in Ukraine, this gem appeared. I think it came from a conference in London as I never met Mr Popov. But it seemed to hit the nail on the head at the time. We were all stumbling around in the dark. By the time the project ended we had learned enough to be able to start doing it properly, but by then it was too late, we usually had to start again with a new counterpart in a new country on a new problem. But the reports got better as well as more beautiful.

Bulgaria

Julian Popov, Bulgaria

COMMUNICATION PROBLEMS BETWEEN WESTERN AID PROGRAMS AND THOSE WHO NEED THEM

John: We are not here to tell you what to do. We are here to tell you what we do and to learn more about you, about your culture and your experience.

Ivan: Our country is very different from your country. You cannot understand our culture and our problems.

This is maybe the most expensive dialogue in the World. Its maintenance costs each year hundreds of millions of pounds to the western taxpayer. This is a typical dialogue between a Western aid missionary and an East European manager. Usually both sides fulfil their declared expectations: John learns something about Ivan, Ivan proves to himself that John cannot understand him.

However there is something deeply wrong in this exercise. And what is wrong is that both John and Ivan have totally different actual expectations from what they declare in their dialogue. Ivan is usually quite contemptuous about his own culture and situation and would like to abandon both as quickly as possible. John cannot bear all the constant excuses for cultural differences and unique problems all of which are specially designed, he thinks, to postpone every action and progress.

All that John wants to say is: Listen, I am fed up with your cultural uniqueness which is nothing else than physical and mental laziness and incapacity to divide a pile of grass between two donkeys (Bulgarian expression).

All that Ivan want to say is: Listen I am fed up with all your silly statements about most obvious things. If everybody there is like you I cannot understand not only why you are richer than us but how you could survive at all.

Both John and Ivan are disappointed by each other. However they are not completely unhappy with their joint venture. John does some travelling, puts one more paragraph on his CV and gets his consultancy fee and daily allowances. Ivan visits a Western country, buys a video and gets copy machine, fax and PC for his office. In the end John and Ivan produce a beautiful report where they put all the key points from the mission statement of the respective aid organisation. And they start to write new proposals for new joint activities.

The above described story presents a problem which is multiplied on different levels. It could be formulated as a breakdown of the link between the mission, political decision, identified needs on the one side, and implementation on the other side. Maybe as a result of the very rapid changes in the Eastern and Central Europe, maybe because of lack of experience in international activities in the East, or maybe because of the confusion about whose money is being spent on these projects and, respectively, who has the right to pressurise participants and to demand results, very often the different parties in these activities are disconnected.

There is a need for these problems to be identified and clearly named and to be constantly fought in order to achieve final results which correspond to the initial purposes of the aid programmes.

Ukraine

The Ukrainian equivalent for this was told me as an anecdote (as always):

There was a Englishman, a Frenchman and a Ukrainian who were travelling together in darkest Africa. They were captured by some cannibals who decided to eat them one by one. However they were all allowed one last request before they were to be popped into the cauldron.

The Englishman asked for a cigar so he could have a good smoke before being eaten. His request was granted and he awaited his fate.

The Frenchman asked for a good dinner (Aside: this doesn't make sense among cannibals, so I must have got it wrong). The Frenchman asked to make love to a beautiful woman. His request was granted and he awaited his fate.

The Ukrainian asked for a good beating. His request was granted. Then he took a pair of pistols from his pocket and shot all the cannibals.

When the Frenchman and the Englishman saw this, they were amazed. If you had the guns why didn't you use them before?

Punchline: You can never get a Ukrainian to do anything without a beating first.

This story was told after I complained that officials hadn't been very active in a seminar. But it wasn't ever clear how I could have beaten them, even psychologically, if they didn't want to change.

Change has already happened

10 or maybe 15 years later, there is resistance but not as much. Former communist countries can become successful in their own right and join the EU. There is not such a big credibility gap or a sense of such a monstrous amount of change needed that it could never be done. There is still an incredible amount of suspicion that west just wants to buy up east, but experience in thriving countries shows that this is generally good rather than bad.

Or am I just getting complacent about jobs lost in restructuring, education and health services ruined because teachers and doctors go abroad to earn money, and pensioners living in poverty because their savings were lost by devaluations or inflation. And in the Balkans there are old and new hatreds, and war damage to cope with.

It's not really getting any easier.

So the police shot an innocent man

The shock of the police (in plain clothes) gunning down a man on the London tube was bad enough. The BBC replayed endlessly one witness's version of what happened. The witness accepted that plain clothes policemen carry guns these days. It seemed there was no warning, the man tripped and then was shot at point blank range. He was described as a Pakistani. The other versions from witnesses were lost. Silence for a long time from the Met, who must have known whether he was a suicide bomber or not pretty quickly after the event.

Now it seems that Jean Charles de Menezes was Brazilian and innocent. Surely there are enough steps to go from challenging an innocent bystander before plain clothes policemen give chase with guns. I sympathise with the police, but this is Britain, where foreigners are not usually caught up with plain clothes policemen, with guns. They presumably look pretty much like gangsters back in Brazil, rather than PC Plod.

It seems these anti-terrorist police tactics of "blow the brains out since otherwise the hand can still detonate the bomb" have been learnt from the Israeli military, who everybody knows have carte blanche and are not held accountable for their methods against Palestinians.

Electric pylons around the world

So hot in Athens and can't drive yet after the op, so can't make it to the beach.

After a spell on the roof sunbathing, I tried to cool off in the dark inside, in front of the computer. Finally found time to look at the museum of online museums I had bookmarked some time ago. Amongst all the "genuine" (read worthy) museums I also found sites for grocery lists, and manhole covers. But the absolute gem for me, given my work, was this one.

An extract from the section on "climbing pylons":

But of course some people have climbed them anyway ...

For some people they are attractive targets. Even for "normal" people. I've asked around in my circle of acquaintances and see what I got:

One of the members of our choir has climbed them as a child.
One of my bosses has climbed them as a child. He says that they got a nice view of the landscape. And they found out that the top wire carries no power.

My boss described it very graphically, so imagine the following situation:

My boss and his friend have climbed to the top of the tower.
My boss notices that the power cables are hung from insulators.
Notices that the top wire has no insulators.
Touching the top wire with his hand: "Hey, cool, it doesn't carry any current!"
After this discovery they made plans to make a cable car from an old bicycle wheel and to cross the river hanging from the top wire. But they never put it into practice.

It seems that people grow out of this as they get older. Usually they turn to other nerve-wrecking activities. My choir-colleague became a professional photographer. And my boss became a network manager.

And some people have even taken pictures ...

The brother of a colleague of mine has climbed transmission line towers and building cranes. I exchanged some short e-mails with him and talked to him over the phone. He acted as if it wasn't such a big deal. Let me quote him:

What could I tell you? It works like this: you climb up and then you climb down again.
I didn't use any special techniques. I did it UNSECURED and UNINSURED ("ongezekerd en onverzekerd").
At one time I hung a pirate's flag (skull and bones) from the top-wire. But when I came back a few days later it was gone.

Looking up at the 110kV transmission line tower near Geleen. On the right you see the backside of a small sign. Usually these say "Mortal danger".

Haradinaj posters and the growth of civil society

Today I found a reference to these posters in the paper Kosovo after Haradinaj written by the International Crisis Group in May 2005.

Here's their description of how the campaign arose:

A new urban group of activists used an innovative campaign to help channel anger into safe channels. At lunchtime on 8 March (2004, the day of the arrest), while the Veterans Association hesitated, seven or eight young Pristina professionals, who had previously organised a campaign for orphans, came together, determined to "do something". After co-authoring a declaration with other NGOs to go out under a Kosovo "civilsociety" by-line emphasising that Haradinaj was "needed here", they enlisted a Pristina-Vienna internet design company to produce a logo, bought 300 white t-shirts with their own money, and got them printed up. On 9 Mach they trawled Pristina's bars, cafes and hotels, persuading service staff to wear the t-shirts. A businessman financed a larger run of 1000 t-shirts, which were snapped up. Billboard owners offered space. One of the activists, Laura Kryeziu said, "It was very easy to get people to volunteer". The campaign snowballed, with people and groups from all over Kosovo printing, distributing or using the design themselves. (A website was quickly constructed to enable downloading of the design: www.ourprime.org). The Office of the Prime Minister and the AAK (Haradinaj's party) were initially mystified, although many naturally assumed that their own people had prepared the campaign. The friends insist they has no set plan but "gained enthusiasm and inspiration with each hour" and were overwhelmed by the results.

Within a week the "our Prime has a job to do here" logo, with its vaguely Andy Warhol-style portrait of Haradinaj was ubiquitous, displayed in shop windows like a "help wanted" notice. Instead of mounting joint protests with the war veterans, as was their previous practice, University of Pristina students took up the logo for a rock concert on 21 March. The youth wing of the AAK adopted it too, manning petition points, which became the next fous of a campaign that had a modern edge neither the AAK nor Kosovo's other more traditional protest organisers could have achieved. Its focus on Haradinaj's role as prime minister rather than his war role was deliberate. His unexpectedly impressive performance in that job had caught the attention of Pristina's youthful urban elite. Without it their engagement would not have been forthcoming, and without the vehicle they provided, the protest could have taken a more destructive form. As an organiser said, "The campaign worked because there was latent social demand for it. It gave a way to show defiance safely, in English, directed at the international community.

How we quickly we forget that the whole of Eastern Europe did not have these campaigning skills before 1990. So how could Kosovars who had been kept out of the political process by the Serbs all through the 90s have them?

A new periodic table

Not the sort of thing I normally blog about, but it's always good to see science becoming more beautiful.  Click here (courtesy of 3quarksdaily) and don't miss the slide show.

After the op

Well I survived. It took more than one day, as a heart case was more urgent than me.

As a result I got a double room with a Greek woman and a view of Greek hospital visiting: large numbers from morning till night. Then the TV was on till after midnight. So I was glad to get home.

The doctor was great, told me the gall bladder was swollen and it was difficult to operate, so just as well I had elected to have surgery rather than waiting for the problems.

Now I just have to wait a week to get the stitches out and back to normal food. Made the mistake of reading the internet on what happens after surgery and got too much of what can go wrong, but mostly from Americans who didn't seem to know what the gall bladder was for.

But no problems with food so far, walking around, just stretching is a bit painful.

Bad day at work

Not strictly at work today, preparing for op, but mood pretty similar.

Try this courtesy of Maggi Dawn

Always on internet and blogging

Haven't had time to do much blogging in or on life in Kosovo. Partly it is because I have no internet in the evening.

The project house has an Ethernet cable which disappears down a hole in the wall, presumably in the direction of the landlord who lives in the basement. And that's it. Nothing happens on connection, though two pieces of paper give clues: one has a set of IP addresses and the other gives instructions in strange English how to turn on the generator.

However on the few times we have had power cuts, the generator comes on automatically, feeding emergency lights in the kitchen and living room and leaving you on your own elsewhere. Luckily the power cuts are rather short (so far never more than an hour and often only 20 minutes). And not every night.

So on Thursday evening I was about to venture out to find the nearest internet cafe, of which there are plenty in Pristina, even on "Sunny Hill" (10 minutes out of the centre) where I live. But on my way out about 8.30, when it was just going dark, there was a power cut. I grabbed my small torch and wandered out in the twilight wondering who would have generators. The answer: nearly all the shops and cafes, and most houses had some electric lights on.

The nearest cafe seemed to be mainly playstations so I gave that a miss. Continual games involving shooting noises doesn't seem a conducive background to reflective blogging. Down in the main street I peered into a basement where the clientele was entirely male and felt inhibited. Somehow it felt like the equivalent of the Greek kafeneion, the preserve of elderly Greek males with nothing much to do. I convinced myself that this was not a good night for getting hooked to a computer screen, as when darkness fell, I would only have a small torch to get home by. Of course this was just being feeble, as the power came back on within 20mins of being back home.

Can I blog at work? It's true there is no one about and nobody watching me, so there is nothing to stop me except the slow internet connection (grinds to a halt frequently in the afternoon). But in such a sensitive place, and on a government computer network, it doesn't seem right.

But mostly I think it is my own head, which is struggling to work out my own reaction to what I see and hear there. I was never able to provide instant reactions. Of course, in many ways, that is blogging's strength: instant reactions from many people who have not yet been told what to think by the media.

Maybe now I am back in Greece for the summer, some thoughts and impressions will be easier to put down on paper, or should I say on the screen.

Remembers: it's only two months now that we have had always on DSL at home in Athens, but it already seems a life time.

Letting off steam

The problem with starting a new project on your own in a new country is that you have to go round asking everyone's opinion on what you are supposed to be doing. You end up feeling battered from pillar to post with the different views of what you should do, the blaming of everyone else for what they have not done and the usual misunderstandings (especially by you yourself) of what you are supposed to be doing.

At first it's very hard to tell who are the "good" and "bad" guys or at least those who can help you, and you have to make recommendations on what to do before you have really learnt much about the problem, or the beneficiary has learned how to use you. No one else can really help you, though people who have been there longer are very useful for testing ideas and for the reassurance of having been there before. Of course if you are part of a big team, then not everyone will have had a bad day.

All in all, a muddle. But somehow, usually after a break, when nobody does anything, it all seems to come together and you can start work.

Just now I feel I haven't a clue and that this is the silliest project I have done for a long time. But perhaps by this evening it will all have changed.

Did I really offer to do a training on how to attend international meetings? Somehow it got turned into tactics on how to deal with Serb/Kosovar confrontations. What have I let myself in for?