Atlantic crossing

I spent Christmas 2010 in England; it was fiercely cold and the country was blanketed in snow. On January 8 I travelled from my sister’s home in the Oxfordshire countryside to my flat in New York’s Harlem district. It seems a routine journey, but the Atlantic is never routine for me; my first memory in life comes from that journey, and the ocean has always fired my imagination. I jotted down random thoughts that spilled out on the Atlantic crossing, on the nature of travel and the movement of people. This is what emerged. If it makes no sense, don’t worry; it wasn’t meant to.

10.15am GMT
The blue sky is so pale in winter;  everything was thrown into delicate relief, the intricate patterns of the bare twigs, and the ridges of grit on the country road.  It was getting warmer, and the road surface was damp and black between the banks of snow on either side. I came round the bend at the bottom of the hill that leads out of the village of Combe and there was a magpie. I looked at once for its mate but it was alone. One for sorrow.

Over the brow of Stokenchurch Hill, and into the Chilterns. I was thinking of another journey to Heathrow on a November day nearly a quarter of a century ago, sitting beside my father in his silver Saab. Then as now I did not want to go. I'm mad. I can't do this. I can't go to Africa. Hubris. Idiot. The weather was dull, with a low thin cloud stretched over the landscape. Then just for a minute a small patch of very wan sun lit lit up a field to the left of the road, and I saw that there was a dip in the land towards the far side of the field, the little island of sunlight lifting it from the dull landscape around. Then the sunlight was gone, and we were surrounded by murk again. For some reason I never forgot that patch of sunlight on a dip in the field. It did not seem random. But I never could find that little hollow n the land again, and could not remember where I had seen it. Now this morning, as I hurtle over the crest of Stokenchurch Hill and down towards High Wycombe, I saw it again. The snow had melted here, and the field seemed greener than before; perhaps then it was fallow or rough pasture.  Then I looked back towards the road and see the traffic ahead dividing to the left and right round an object in the carriageway, and I veered quickly to the left myself. It was a swan. A swan was lying in the middle of the road, on its breast, its wings spread to either side, its neck twisted and arched. Then a small wooded valley opened up to the right; it was hemmed in by busy roads, and there was a white Georgian manor standing there looking oddly out of place.

4.00pm GMT
Sitting in Gate 40 of Terminal 3, looking out at the aircraft drawn up beside us, the aluminium gleaming dully in the thin yellowish afternoon sun, a little desultory activity beneath the wings, a yellow cart scurrying here and there and the odd chap in orange dayglo vest walking purposefully across the tarmac with a clipboard. There didn’t seem to be many passengers (there weren't; I would have a row to myself, with lots of room for long-flight detritus – books and jackets and customs forms and empty plastic glasses and little packets of biscuits that I would end up throwing away when I get home).

Once, this journey had a sense of occasion.  I was remembering a previous crossing; it was August 1968, I was 11 and we were on the boat train. I wonder which was the last boat train, and when did it run? This one began at Euston and ran straight through Liverpool and into the dock. We got out of the train on one side of a huge shed-like building; on the other side of it I could see a mighty white wall that seems to stretch right across the horizon, studded with windows. It took me a while to realise what it was, then the round portholes give it away. The shed was a heaving mass of steamer trunks and children and loud cheerful voices. There was a festive atmosphere. Lots of families had come to see people off.  Looking back, I suppose many of our fellow-passengers were actually emigrating. These were the last days of the Assisted Passage, when “ten-pound poms” made the six-week voyage to Australia for that sum. Others went to Canada and would certainly have been aboard; there were no wide-bodied jets then, and flying was still extremely expensive.

We rid ourselves of a huge mound of luggage, all of it plastered with labels that said CANADIAN PACIFIC NOT WANTED ON VOYAGE (yes, really; we had those labels). Two or three hours later I was standing by the rail somewhere near the stern, sensing a growing motion as the great white wall moves slowly away from the quay. The water in the widening gap was churned up, probably not by the screws – tugs  were pulling us out – but by the current flowing in to replace the 50,000 tons of steel as it pulled away. On the surface of the grey-brown water a solitary steamer trunk bobbed up and down; it had fallen in during loading, and now a trio of dockers peered down at it from the quay, waving grappling hooks. "I gather the chap's DPhil thesis was in it," says a jocular voice behind me. Someone else chuckled: "I say, I do hope he has a carbon copy!" I' was hemmed in on both sides by fellow-passengers taking their leave of those on the quay; many are clutching the ends of long thin brightly-coloured paper streamers, the other ends held by their friends many tens of feet below. As the gap widens, the streamers part, sometimes dropped, sometimes broken, and fall onto the rising and falling water below.

We went below. In the morning I went back on deck. We had come up the Firth of Clyde in the night and were lying off Greenock. The engines had stopped and the late-summer morning was dead calm, the Clyde estuary miles wide and as still as glass below a huge blue morning sky, greenish-brown mountains across the Clyde, an extraordinary feeling of light and space. All that moves is the tender, a small launch that noses out towards us from Greenock with mail and a few last passengers for the New World.

It was almost the end of the North Atlantic liners. The Empress of Canada already sailed only in summer, and a year or so later the first wide-bodied jets entered service and the historic service from Liverpool to the St Lawrence was abandoned.  The last two White Empresses fell into the twilight existence of cruise liners; but the Canada was one of the last survivors, and lived on, long-forgotten, until the end of 2003. Then she went to Pakistan, to Gadani Beach. This must be one of the strangest places on earth. They just run the ships straight onto the beach at full speed so that they plough deep into the sands, and then an army of thin men in white swarm aboard and break them with hammers and axes and the sweat of their brows.

I'm looking at the aircraft outside; there's a little more activity; a few more people with clipboards, a whine as a cargo door is closed. They won't break her. They will send her to the Boneyard. The Boneyard is in the Arizona desert and hundreds of ghostly aeroplanes stand there, preserved in the dry desert air; vast Boeing 747s, 777s like this one, B52s, jumbos, transports from Vietnam, Northrops that once dropped napalm.

9.30pm GMT
There is an eerie tranquility in an aircraft in mid-flight at night. The lights are off and people are dozing; one or two are working on laptops; others are watching the screens set into the backs of the seats in front. Few read nowadays. I do though. I once devoured almost all 600 pages of William Woodruff's Nab End duology on a 12-hour slog from São Paulo to London. Tonight I had an anthology of the best American travel writing from 2010 and it was rather good. It included a very intelligent piece by Simon Winchester and I was reminded that he had recently written a 'biography' of the Atlantic. I haven't read it; I should, but I'm thinking about the Atlantic anyway, that great labile treacherous mass of water 40,000 feet below my arse.

I was trying to imagine that first flight in a fragile biplane, ending in an Irish bog. (I think it was probably just a field really. But it was in Ireland, so everyone decided they'd landed in a bog.) Leather jackets and thick woollens and leather flying-helmets, thick goggles; wind tearing through the strut wires; wooden propellors; engines forged from metals crude to us and badly fitting, sprays of oil in the slipstream, that sound from undamped exhausts that they used to say was like ripping calico, only nowadays no-one knows what ripping calico sounded like so perhaps there should be a new simile.

Some journeys on this ocean always have ended badly. You are in your cabin; it was a five-day voyage before, but now it's three weeks as you limp along at the pace of the slowest ship, and you zigzag and dogleg, and destroyers and corvettes fuss around like smoky sheepdogs. It's early morning and you're still in your bunk when there is a soft thud and a jolt and the ship falters and seems to have come to a stop. There is an odd silence. The lights flicker but stay on. You can hear the footsteps of a steward clanging on the steel floor of the passage outside so you open the door. No, probably nothing to worry about, but perhaps you wouldn't mind going topside, sir, do you have warm clothing? – good, sir, if you can get it on quickly. On deck everything's quite calm, but the other ships have moved on ahead, leaving a black smoke stain on the horizon; and you're alone in the early morning between a still, solid grey sea and a gunmetal sky, and there's a cool breeze. It's very calm and it must be only your imagination that the ship is settling slowly to starboard. In fact everything is so calm that you cannot envisage the jagged hole below and the cold water streaming in across the hot boilers and the lascars and stokers screaming in agony from the superheated steam.

When I was young, many older people hated the sea.

1.30am GMT, 8.30pm EST
Yellow cabs have this floaty motion, the big heavy old-fashioned bodies swaying across bumps and centrelines and potholes. A thick bulletproof steel wall divides you from the driver, but there is a sliding glass panel in it and it is always open. On the back of the steel wall is a little video screen, like the ones you get in planes. You can touch it to zoom in to the map and see your position, but mostly it plays a loop of what-to-do-in-NY and restaurants and cookery. Its clatter in the background merges with the sanitised rapping from the driver's radio and the murmur of his voice as he talks on his cellphone. He's talking to another cab driver, a friend or maybe a relative, and clearly a beginner, a fellow-African probably from Mali or Senegal, no you gotta take the other slip, the second slip for La Guardia, where're you anyhow, no the second slip, the second you listening to me? and just then La Guardia drifts past on our starboard bow. A little later the cab slows for the tollbooths before the Triborough Bridge that links Queens with Manhattan. It's very long, the Triborough Bridge, and if you look left you can see the spires of Manhattan stud the skyline in the distance, lights shimmering in the great expanse of the East River that lies between.

Most times I do look left. I don't know why but I looked right that night. Another, unlit, bridge runs parallel to the Triborough Bridge, a thousand yards or so to the north. It's an old-fashioned bridge, desolate and lifeless; gantries show that it is a railway bridge. It rises to an elaborate iron cantilever that reminds me of the Forth Bridge; this must carry the central span, and then it runs downward to the shore, where its great length finally merges with the mess of sheds and concrete on the Manhattan bank. As it runs down it passes through an archaic arch and pediment, surmounted by ornate stone or concrete globes, just visible against the night sky. That night, nothing stirred on this old bridge.

I was looking through a wormhole. Any moment, I would see sparks and smoke, and steam white against the night, and an enormous engine with four or five driving wheels on each side would issue forth onto the cantilever, followed by dimly-lit carriages with slatted wooden benches packed with tired and sullen Swedes and Sicilians and Galicians, rocking gently with the movement of the train, fresh from a grimy floating coffin that has brought them to try their luck in the homesteads of Oklahoma and the stockyards of Chicago and the orchards of California. Then the cab floated and swayed across the ramp at the foot of the Triborough Bridge. The wormhole closesd.  We were surrounded by bright lights again, and brightly-lit and deserted pizza parlours, furniture wholesalers, shoe repairers, small piles of grimy ossified snow, crushed hamburger cartons, liquor stores, overhead railroad tracks in latticed iron cages, congealed posters on boarded windows, short nuggety Hispanic men on bicycles delivering takeouts, and lots of African-American men in parkas and earphones, hunched against the bitter cold.

In November friends went to Sudan on business. "You must see the Mogren, where the Blue and White Niles meet," I said. "Especially at sunset. It's a huge expanse of water and there are oxen ploughing near it and date-palms, and it's where the big silver Short Empire flying-boats landed from 1937 to 1947 on their way from Southampton to the Cape." After a week, I got an email. They were sharing a modern flat near the airport, and every morning a car came to collect them and drive them from one side of the airport to the office on the other, past rows of identical modern flats lining wide treeless streets under a white-hot sky. "It isn't really charming," says my friend. At the office they worked 12-hour days, then did some more when they got home. "The Nile's only 300 meters away, apparently," my friend writes. "We haven't seen it." So it goes for six weeks, and then the day before they leave they finally get to the Mogren and stand beside it for five minutes. There's a picture, of two graceful but rather tired young women standing squinting beside a sheet of blue-grey water, the scene bleached of all detail by the midday sun.

If I look for long enough I see the sun start to set over the Mogren. Details emerge, trees, fields, the odd oxen driven across loamy earth by a chap in a white headcloth and djellabiya. Orange rays lance across the water from the setting sun. There's a big silver flying-boat on the water, and someone is leaning from the nose with a grappling hook to push it away from the shore. On the jetty stand great tin drums from which aviation spirit has been poured into the tanks, very slowly and carefully, filtered through muslin. There's one hell of a roar as first one engine, then the other three, start, black smoke jetting from crackling exhausts. The boat turns and taxis away, leaning down a little by the rear, its tall tail-fin standing up against the dark blue sky. After a mile or so it turns; the engines pick up and it lumbers forward and the hull lifts slowly from the surface, and thin sheets of silver water cascade off the shiny aluminium surface, and drop away, leaving a few flying drops to catch the setting sun behind. Then the plane goes higher and further away until it's just a dot, droning south towards Lake Victoria across Kordofan and the Sudd and great herds of animals and men with spears who stand on one leg in the shallows.

The future has yet to be created; it does not exist – but the past does. Those who came this way before are all around you.  If you stop and close your eyes for long enough you can see them flowing past you like a river, and if you think hard you can make the river flow backwards so that aeroplanes rise from bogs and ships reassemble themselves on beaches strewn with steel detritus, and men and women stream back across the midwestern plains, through Ellis Island and back into steerage, and if you go back far enough you can see us all cantering backwards across the steppe on small, stocky, shaggy horses, back to wherever we began.

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Mike Robbins's collection of travel writing, The Nine Horizons, was published in 2014 and is available as a paperback, as a Kindle download and in other eBook formats.

Civil society and social capital

Three weeks into a new year; it's been a mild winter in New York so far, but now it's cold and getting colder. Time to stay indoors and finish the thoughts on democracy that I began with my last post.

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That post (December 31 2012) started with the premise that democracy, so often regarded as automatically a good, ought to have to defend itself. It concluded that democracy is indeed A Good Thing but needs to be based on much more than the right to vote if it is to be meaningful.

I argued that there were three essential dimensions to democracy, of which the right to vote out a government was only one. The second is the right to organise;  if that dimension isn’t there, people may be as poor and miserable under democracy as they are under any other system. But even that does not in itself create a world in which people can reach their full potential and can not be bullied. What’s needed is a third dimension for democracy – a society in which horizontal, as much as vertical, links between people are the norm.

 Many people would look for evidence of those horizontal norms in a vigorous civil society. What does that consist of? And does it necessarily imply democracy for all? In this post, I’m going to argue that it can – but not on its own.  I will also look at whether it is possible to create that third dimension of democracy.  Can we?

What is civil society?

Civil society is often too loosely defined. The World Bank has described it thus: “Civil society consists of the groups and organizations, both formal and informal, which act independently of the state and market to promote diverse interests in society.” This is clear enough, but rather broad. A 1998 concept paper developed for the Ford Foundation defined it thus: “An intermediate realm situated between state and household, populated by organized groups or associations which are separate from the state, and are formed voluntarily by members of society to protect or extend their interests, values or identities.”  (This seems to exclude non-government organisations, or NGOs, that promote the interests or identities of others; but in so doing, they are promoting their own values, so perhaps they fit in.) This is still a very inclusive definition. Indeed, this could cover everything from Greenpeace to amateur choirs to the guilds of medieval Europe.

Still, the American sociologist Robert Putnam (of whom more later) has argued that the existence of even a stamp-collecting circle may indicate the health of an economy and society. So let us accept that we are stuck with broad definitions, at least for now. (I am not including political parties as part of civil society. If it is seen as the space between the household and the state, then bodies that might themselves become part of that state should be excluded.)

Does civil society as normally understood – that is to say, NGOs and interest groups – enhance democracy?

The simplest way to answer that by asking about its effect on people’s welfare.  On the face of it, it must do. Civil society in this sense is the instrument through which the people ensure that the state is acting in their interests and not against them. Without it, they have only the sanction of the vote at (usually) predetermined periods, and that is not enough. Amartya Sen, perhaps the greatest modern intellectual proponent of democracy, has acknowledged this very clearly. “Democracy does not serve as an automatic remedy of ailments as quinine works to remedy malaria,” he says in his much-read 1999 book, Development as freedom. “The opportunity it opens up has to be positively grabbed in order to achieve the desired effect.”

Sen sees participation in public affairs as an intrinsic good. But he also sees a utilitarian justification for participation, both for economic policymaking – and in setting values for society; if one is corrupt it is not necessarily because one is evil, but because one perceives such behaviour as the norm. If such norms are set by everyone in society, including the victims as well as the perpetrators, then it is less likely to be acceptable. This suggests that the participation in society indicated by a lively civil sector may limit corruption.

This is a tangible benefit, because corruption lowers living standards. In a 2001 speech in Mumbai, the economist Nicholas Stern pointed out that in those Indian states regarded by businessmen as a bad place to operate, enterprises were visited roughly twice as often by public officials as in those states with a good investment climate. While not explicitly connecting this with corruption, he does mention elsewhere the “extent and nature of regulation… and the corruption associated with it.” In the ‘good’ states, wages were rather higher, suggesting that the real losers may often be the workforce. Corruption lowers living standards – even, perhaps, for the corrupt. The implication of this, through Sen’s eyes, would presumably be that a strong civil society protects people from poverty.

How else might civil society help people besides limiting corruption – if it does?

In developing countries, the role of civil society is most obvious at ground level. While international NGOs such as Oxfam and MSF attract attention, their work may be supported by a number of much smaller international and national NGOs. An example is Sudan, where the 1984-1985 crisis saw many Eritrean, Ethiopian and Tigrayan refugees arrive in the refugee settlements in the Eastern Region.  A 1988 inventory of the settlements that I helped prepare two years later showed that although much of the relief and development work in the region was funded by UNHCR, implementation on the ground – that is, basic health services and the like - were run by NGOs, sometimes international but often indigenous. UNICEF does the same; its work around the world for children is through implementing partners, often government but also NGOs, including small local bodies as well as international ones. It sounds obvious to anyone involved in development, but direct interventions on the ground by huge international bodies are doomed to failure; however much money is available, some sort of civil society is needed to get it to people on the ground.

Moreover, in developing countries civil society does far more than enable outside intervention. It often take the form of less formal community-based organizations through which people organise themselves for mutual benefit. These can include rotating savings and credit associations that provide collateral-free credit and are also social safety nets. Or they might be burial societies or even brewing or drinking circles. In a 2001 paper, researcher Diana Mitlin quoted studies that had found large numbers of grassroots organisations in (for example) Quezon City, where 22 were identified in an area of 8,000 households; Bangkok, where there were over 30 associations in one low-income settlement; Mumbai, where there were 42 organizations spread over 3,500 households; and Nairobi, where 27% of women belonged to some sort of organization – usually either brewing or rotating credit associations.

Civil society...  A good thing?

The implications so far seem to be that civil society is a good thing; it’s a space between the household and the state that lets the former defend itself from the latter and from corruption, it channels development aid and it promotes self-help. It is, in short, the vehicle for the horizontal interactions that I cited, in my previous post, as the essential third dimension of democracy.

But civil society is not in itself evidence ofthis third dimension. Mitlin, for example, warns that grassroots organizations are not always positive; they may be dominated by one group or individual, reinforcing local feelings of powerlessness. They may involve few of the community, or their membership may be skewed; or groups may conflict with each other. NGOs, too, do not automatically command respect of their target groups. Visiting EU-funded development projects in the former Soviet Union some years ago, I was told that “indigenous” NGOs were sometimes poor partners, being seen by the locals as organisations whose main aim was to secure foreign development funds rather than to help their own people.

This is of huge significance in planning development policy. International organisations and national development ministries in developed countries have adopted working with civil society, particularly grassroots organizations, as a norm. This cannot be wrong in itself. Top-down projects are often founded on false assumptions and in any case, civil society can mobilise resources in a way that the state alone cannot. Besides, people have a right to participate in their future. But if grassroots organizations or NGOs behave in a top-down manner to their own members, might it be safer to do without them?

Perhaps the way civil society bodies behave is a reflection of a country’s broader polity. Mitlin seems to think so. She argues that the power structures linking people to the state can also define this behaviour to a great extent. “Problems of leadership and participation within grassroots organizations cannot be separated from the broader context of state officials’ and politicians’ relations of patronage with community leaders,” she says. It’s a reminder of de Tocqueville’s view, quoted in my last post,  that it “is unreasonable to suppose that local liberties can be created at will, or maintained for any length of time, when general liberty is extinct.”

De Tocqueville was thinking of formal state-level power structures, but this is also about the relationships between people – whether their nation consists of 10 million individuals, to each of whom the state belongs; or two million families that distrust each other, and between which an unloved state keeps the balance by force. The latter description could certainly be applied to some countries that are widely seen as democracies, and in such a situation a strong civil society should perhaps not be seen as an automatic good.

Francis Fukuyama, in his 1995 book Trust: Social Virtues and Creation of Prosperity, wrote: “Cartels, guilds, professional associations, unions, political parties, lobbying organizations, and the like … seldom serve the broader economic interests of society as a whole… Many economists regard the proliferation of such groups as a drag on overall economic efficiency.” This is not an isolated view. In a controversial 1982 book, The rise and decline of nations, economist Mancur Olson argued that the growth of such bodies has been responsible for the decline in some Western economies, notably Britain’s. “The gang fight is fully as rough as the individual duel, and the struggle of special-interest groups generates no magnanimity or altruism,” he wrote.

Civil society, then, can be a sign of a healthy society – but it isn’t always, and doesn’t prove the existence of that elusive third dimension of democracy, the network of horizontal rather than vertical links that make the state a servant and not a master. So there is a need to find a link that causes civil society to enhance the quality of a democracy. The Harvard political scientist and thinker Robert Putnam has long seen such a link, and his 1993 book Making democracy work: Civic traditions in modern Italy has been seminal.

Civil society and social capital: the Italian experience

In 1970 authority was devolved to new local governments in Italy. This enabled Putnam and his associates to compare the performance of these institutions, all of which were starting, on paper, from the same base – and see which ones did better, and why.

The task took over 20 years. Putnam and his colleagues used a number of ruses to test government performance – for example, writing to the local administration to ask how one could be reimbursed for medical costs incurred abroad, and comparing the speed and quality of the reply. Relative punctuality in fixing the annual budget was also revealing. Taken together with public’s own perception of the region’s efficiency, there was a startling difference between the wealthy north and relatively poor south. Clearly, the richer a region was, the better its government was likely to be; but why?

Putnam found a correlation not just with per capita income, but also with ‘civicness’ – a tendency to associate in groups. The range of groups he accepted for this analysis was very broad, including for example choral societies. The number of such groups varied from one per 1,050 inhabitants in Trentino-Alto Adige to one per 13,100 in Sardinia. Newspaper readership was also much lower in impoverished regions. So Putnam did not conclude that wealth alone created civil society. The evidence seemed to suggest a more complex link; the south had then been, if anything, more industrialized and wealthier than the North. ‘Civicness’ earlier in the century seemed to indicate more economic development now. “Economics does not predict civics, but civics does predict economics,” Putnam wrote.

It is of course one thing to find a purely correlative relationship, which of itself proves nothing. It is quite another thing to find causality. But Putnam claimed he had. His argument, briefly stated, was this: in the Middle Ages, the collapse of existing power structures all over Italy led the north and south to diverge. The South and Sicily found themselves part of a strong Norman empire: “As the centuries passed, the steep social hierarchy came to be ever more dominated by a landed aristocracy endowed with feudal powers,”  wrote Putnam. In the north, however, no-one imposed order; rather, there was a dark chaos against which townspeople were forced to unite: “The solution… was quite different, relying less on vertical hierarchy and more on horizontal collaboration. …The extent of popular participation in government affairs was extraordinary.”

Putnam compared preference voting and local-government patronage to demonstrate that the south continued to have a system of vertical social relations, whereas those in the north were based on horizontal relationships and, crucially, trust in others outside the family. He regarded this as historically determined, and although he stopped short of saying that that there was no escape, he did strongly imply it. “The fate of the Mezzogiorno [midday – e.g., south] is an object lesson for the Third World today and the former Communist land of Eurasia tomorrow, moving uncertainly towards self-government… Palermo may represent the future of Moscow.”

To Putnam, what was lacking in the south was social capital.

Social capital: The missing link?

As researchers Narayan and Pritchett put it some years ago, “Social capital… is many things to many people: it is the proverbial elephant felt by the five blind men.”  Francis Fukuyama, in a paper prepared for an IMF conference in 1999, commented that: “While social capital has been given a number of different definitions, many of them refer to manifestations of social capital rather than to social capital itself.” The definition he chose was: “An instantiated informal norm that promotes cooperation between two or more individuals.” This fits well with the description given by the sociologist James Coleman in the 1988 paper in which he is sometimes said to have ‘invented’ the term.

Broadly, it is the existence of a relationship with or trust in others that lowers transaction costs in such a way as to make economic or other interaction much easier. Coleman cited the community of Jewish diamond merchants in New York, who can lend each other gems for inspection without huge investment in security and insurance; and traders in Cairo’s Khan el-Khalili market, who cooperate so closely that unrelated enterprises function in effect as a huge department store. From my own observation, the great souk of Aleppo in Syria functioned in a similar way  before the awful current conflict. Moreover traders in similar commodities tended to work in the same alley, and may have shared mosques and baths. Access to such social capital may have a profound effect on living standards, although much research remains to be done on why.

Clearly we are talking here of horizontal linkages – whereas, as we have seen, civil society organizations are sometimes part of a series of vertical linkages between the individual and the state, and may themselves be based on clientelism and patronage. After all, all sorts of organizations constitute civil society, from Greenpeace to the Ku Klux Klan. We should therefore not confuse social capital with civil society although it is often done, either overtly or by implication. Is it the prevalence of social capital that is the elusive third dimension of democracy?

We should be careful here. Social capital is a young concept. Having arisen from academia, it was seized upon in the 1990s by the World Bank, which in 2000 published Social capital: A multifaceted perspective – a collection of  papers that further refined and defined the concept and its place in development. It’s an absorbing and distinguished volume. But it is easy to see why the Left saw social capital and its place in development becoming a new orthodoxy if unquestioned, rather as neo-liberalism did in the 1980s. Professor Ben Fine of SOAS warned in 1999 that although the Bank was apparently abandoning the pure neo-liberal consensus, it was smuggling social capital into its position instead.

There were some problems (for me) with Fine’s argument, but he was surely right to warn that a causal link between social capital and living standards should not be established on the basis of a few studies. One should be equally careful of assuming that it is the essential third dimension of democracy, and somehow gives people ownership of the power structures that define their lives. Moreover, Fine, Fukuyama and others have suggested that social capital may manifest itself through membership of groups with objectives that are either totally negative, or clash with someone else’s. These groups could include terrorist organizations, or they could be criminal.

But while membership of such groups may confer personal advantage, is it social capital? The term ‘social’ capital implies a public good – that is to say, something from which individuals in that society can profit although they have not contributed, like clean air, civil security and fiscal stability. A culture of trust, in which transaction costs are lowered and productive cooperation made possible, is surely another. What some have called perverse social capital is not social capital, just personal capital.

Moreover if the term ‘social’ implies a public good, an organization that uses or augments social capital must be open to anyone who could reasonably hope to profit by it. Thus if I wish to join a choral society, I will be admitted (unless I truly have a voice like a corncrake; but in that case, would I wish to join?). The same applies to a local housing association or community group. But if I wish to join the Mafia, I cannot drive into Corleone and ask for an application form at the post office. Social capital, then, is a series of horizontal linkages with positive outcomes.

But can it both be created (or recreated), and be converted into civil society elements that enhance both living standards and participation in democracy? If not, then whether it is the ‘third dimension’ or not might be moot. This is important, because what is at issue is whether society can be improved.

Converting social capital

Trust cannot easily be created.  Putnam argued that an individual’s most rational response to collective irrationality is to join it: “Individuals responding rationally to the social context bequeathed to them by history reinforce the social pathologies.”

But several commentators have found Putnam’s determinism too much. Moreover there are examples of the apparent creation of social capital. The highly-regarded Cornell academic, Professor Norman Uphoff,  has used the example of the Gal Oya irrigation scheme in Sri Lanka, which mobilised latent social capital. In a 1988 paper, James Coleman described how residents on a new housing estate united against the contractor over building defects – and remained together afterwards as an informal housing association. He also recalled that New York print workers formed a social club that evolved into a specialist labour exchange and later provided facilities for a political party.

Can the state, or development projects, encourage this process? Maybe. The aftermath of the Soviet bloc’s breakup provides some examples. In Kyrgyzstan, where landholdings were severely fragmented by the post-1991 land reform, the EC’s Tacis programme brought farmers together for marketing and credit provision. The programme also helped municipal governments in the European Union work with counterparts in the former Soviet bloc, and several of the resulting schemes – for example, for multiply-handicapped children and a crisis centre for women – were run by and for the community. But an influential ‘champion’ for these projects was generally needed on the CIS side, indicating that vertical power structures were still in place. And in any case,  was social capital being created, or simply enabled?

A useful analytical tool here is Norman Uphoff’s division of social capital into two types: cognitive and structural. The former covers norms, values, attitudes and beliefs that create and “reinforce positive interdependence and ...mutually beneficial collective action.” Structural forms, by contrast, are the roles, rules, procedures, precedents and networks that assist such collective action “by lowering transaction costs, coordinating efforts, creating expectations, making certain outcomes more probable, providing assurance about how others will act, and so on.”

It seems that structural forms help cognitive forms express themselves. A good example may be found in the creation of agricultural service cooperatives in the former Soviet Union after 1991. Agricultural output declined by more than 35% between 1990 and 1996, largely because the end of the collective farm had deprived farmers of inputs such as fertilisers and cut them off from their markets. In Ukraine in the late 1990s, smallholders, many of whom had taken a cow as part of their share of a dissolved collective, produced 65% of the milk, but only 10% of their production was reaching dairy plants. The EU’s Tacis programme helped farmers fight back through an agricultural cooperatives project. The new cooperatives provided alternative sources of inputs and marketing. They did not always take root, but there were notable successes.

Crucially, the state had contributed structural social capital, in the form of appropriate legislation and policy. But in doing so, had they created the cognitive social capital from scratch, or simply allowed latent networks of trust and cooperation to reassert themselves? Maybe the latter. In 1917, before the Revolution, there had in fact been about 11,500 agricultural cooperatives in the Russian empire, with about 1.1 million members. Norman Uphoff, in his discussion of the Gal Oya scheme, reports that there was residual social capital in the form of cultural practices.

None of this proves that cognitive social capital can not be created from scratch, and the jury is still out. But there is scant evidence of it. What is clear is that it can be recreated, with judicious support from the state or from development agencies – for example, legislation that protects those who take part in joint enterprises, or a guarantee that no-one will be penalised for collective action. There also seems to be sufficient evidence that social capital, seen as horizontal networks of trust, will eventually manifest itself in the form of civil society organisations that have their roots in a society in which relationships are based on trust and not on patronage and power structures.

So – back to the questions I began with. Does the existence of civil society imply a healthy democracy, complete with that third dimension? Not necessarily. Can that third dimension be created? Yes, in a manner of speaking, through the creation of structural social capital. And it’s here that we should see a very large danger sign.

The creation of structural social capital should be confined to enabling mechanisms; good standard statutes for co-ops, for example, or mutual savings systems. At no time should the state believe that it can create cognitive social capital. Should it try, we would be back in the era of the utopian belief systems that made the twentieth century such a dodgy place to be.

Which takes me right back to the thought with which I began the first of these two posts a few weeks ago  –  the imposition of democracy upon the unwilling or disinterested.  A country may have little social capital, either because it has a harsh economic system in which people are forced to compete for survival, or because they are divided along ethnic and religious lines. I have lived in examples of both types of country. In both cases, social relations were vertical; the horizontal structures were not there, and there was scant trust between people. One cannot create social capital from above or outside, because a horizontal society is about what people do of their own free will. All one can do is hope that they do it. The third dimension of democracy is essential; it can be encouraged; but by definition, it cannot be created by anyone other than the people themselves.

Dimensions of democracy

So two cheers for Democracy: one because it admits variety and two because it permits criticism. Two cheers are quite enough: there is no occasion to give three. – E.M. Forster, On What I Believe, 1938

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It’s nearly 2013 and I am watching the New York sky darken with snow outside my workroom window. For some reason I’ve remembered that almost exactly 10 years ago, in December 2002, I was stuck in the bare concrete office of a garage somewhere on England’s Salisbury Plain while the mechanics scoured Hampshire for a Fiat wiper motor. There was nothing to read but a two-day-old tabloid. The headlines were about Hans Blix’s latest verification mission to Iraq, in search of weapons of mass destruction.

My journey, like others in that car, ended with a bodge that sort of worked.  As for Blix’s journey, we know where that ended. Was it fated to do so because the USA and Britain wanted to invade Iraq anyway? Pass; but what we probably can say is that the Western invaders of Iraq, whatever their ultimate agenda, felt that they were bringing democracy to Iraq and that whatever they did could not, therefore, be wrong. The democracy agenda has also been embedded in other Western interventions from Malaya to Vietnam, and most recently in Afghanistan. Yet it has also motivated some of the greatest indigenous rebellions against authority, from 1848 to the Arab Spring. People have paid a high price to achieve democracy, and an equally high price for having it imposed upon them. In view of this, perhaps democracy should be asked to state its case more often.

Democracy is generally understood as the election of representatives by the whole community, which may dismiss them. It also implies basic rights of speech and of combination. I deeply believe in the case for democracy. But I also believe that, in a fast-changing world, conventional definitions of democracy will not do. I start with the argument as to whether democracy helps people lift themselves out of poverty, or whether they should do without it until they have done so. The latter view has been widely held on the Left but was also espoused by the founder of modern Singapore, Lee Kuan Yew.

Democracy and development

Like democracy, development has many definitions. There is a basic split between those who envisage industrial growth along Western lines, and those who see development as a process by which people may realize their potential. But one may (or may not) lead to the other.

Is democracy compatible with development? For some, Amartya Sen’s view – crudely stated, that freedom is development – would end the debate. And, as Sen has pointed out, the Lee thesis is fundamentally flawed: We are poor; we need other things more than democracy; therefore we cannot have democracy. Where is the logic in this?

But democracy had mixed blessings initially in Eastern Europe, where the UN once claimed that declining life expectancy in the 1990s had prevented 10 million men from reaching the millennium. Adrian Leftwich, of the University of York, has suggested that democracy is inherently anti-progressive because its existence requires broad agreement between the major forces in society, who will set conditions for that existence. Leftwich has used failure to secure land reform in South Asia as an example. But he could also have used the emergence of oligarchs in Eastern Europe, and the extent to which their consent has been needed to keep democracy afloat. Moreover, as J. K. Galbraith has pointed out, producers, rather than consumers, may set the economic agenda. He also points to arms manufacture in the USA: “This is not a detail,” he wrote in 1971, “it is half the Federal budget.”

It is unsurprising that many in developing countries feel there is no ‘default case’ for democracy. The Chinese leadership clearly does not think so. “I believe that what a country needs to develop is discipline more than democracy,” Lee Kuan Yew told an audience in the Philippines in 1992. Western commentators have sometimes agreed; the economist Karl de Schweinitz argued in 1959 that poor countries must “limit democratic participation in political affairs” to progress economically. These arguments have usually been pragmatic rather than ideological, but Marxism has provided a theoretical basis for this view. So has utilitarianism. Jeremy Bentham argued that the greater good of the greatest number was incompatible with the doctrine of the Rights of Man, which he therefore condemned as “nonsense on stilts” (though he was not against the use of the law to grant rights; he simply dismissed the view that they were inherent).

This implies a conflict between civil and political rights, and economic, social and cultural rights. In fact, there is no such conflict, as I will argue later on. But first let us consider the empirical evidence as to whether democracy leads to development or vice-versa. It is actually quite weak either way. As Michael Todaro of NYU and Stephen Smith of George Washington University have pointed out, there are countries that have scored badly on the UNDP’s Human Freedom Index while seeing high per capita incomes or rapid growth, while democracies such as India enjoyed neither. It has been argued that this paradox arises because some non-democracies have been economically liberal, while India (for example) was not. But India has done better of late, while the Asian tigers ran into trouble in the late 1990s. Sen has argued that transparency would have prevented the banking collapse that triggered the meltdown. (Although again, Sen was writing in 1999; democracy was no defence against the subsequent Western banking crisis.)

However, it may be that empirical evidence will not in itself tell us much, simply because all such evidence is rooted in a given set of circumstances. Thus the postwar era saw Western democracies buying manufactured goods from the benevolent despotisms of Asia; had they not done so, would those despotisms have exhibited self-sustaining growth?  Perhaps not; that demands a domestic mass-market and that in turn implies a distribution of wealth. The poor must win this through the political system. (I'll return to that below.)

Moreover, since Lee took power the world has changed. Innovators are less willing than others to live in a stultifying system, and the growth in IT has made innovators even more important. In his 2000 book, From third world to first: The Singapore story 1965-2000 (2000), Lee himself eventually accepted that a more open society was needed for this reason. Creativity also drives the evolution of the social framework. As Sen wrote in Development as freedom (1999), “Our conceptualization of economic needs depends crucially on open public debates and discussions.” John Stuart Mill also took this view. “If any opinion is compelled to silence,” he wrote in On liberty, “that opinion may, for aught… we know, be true.” In his 1856 work L'Ancien Régime et la Révolution, De Tocqueville described how the administration of pre-revolutionary France was paralysed by the sale of offices: “It is obvious that none of these pernicious institutions would have survived long had free discussion of them been permitted,” he wrote

Lee has remained convinced that Singapore required discipline earlier in its development. But, as Mill once argued, the form of government seemingly best suited at a certain stage may be inappropriate if it unfits society to the next step. Stalinism provides evidence of this, and much of the Middle East remained frozen in time until the Arab Spring. “The despotism of Augustus,” said Mill, “prepared the Romans for Tiberius.”

But this is a purely utilitarian defence of democracy. Perhaps that’s enough. Bentham, for example, would have thought so. Is it?

No. Any form of human organization must be underpinned by morality lest it be subverted. E.M. Forster, whose belief in democracy was qualified, commented that “no device has been found by which... private decencies can be transmitted to public affairs. As soon as people have power they go crooked ... because the possession of power lifts them into a region where normal honesty never pays. ...The more highly public life is organized the lower does its morality sink ...whereas primitive tribes were at all events restrained by taboos.”

Democracy, then, has to provide a framework for the mobilisation of social capital. For democracy to do that, we must see it not in terms of the way we relate to the State but to the way in which we relate to each other.  Thus Hobbes’s mechanistic analysis of human motivation led him to conclude that we are bound to submit to the sovereign power; 300 years later, Mill, with his subtler view of free will, sees a more complex relationship. A modern British writer on development, UEA’s Ken Cole, has argued that all analysis of human behaviour reflects an a priori view of its motives. “In the understanding of human activity there are always coherent, alternative explanations, which fundamentally reflect different beliefs in human nature,” he states (Economy-Environment-Development-Knowledge, 1999). This is logical, and implies that democracy will bring few benefits to a cynical or rapacious people. A quick glance at Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index confirms this. Democracies do better, but there are several at the bottom of the heap. So perhaps the right to vote will not in itself produce more in the way of development, or freedom, than benevolent despotism. Democracy has to be something more.

The key arguments so far, then, are as follows:

• There is no clear correlation between democracy and development.
• Creativity drives development, and it is less likely to flourish under despotism.
• Some benevolent despotisms have undergone rapid growth, but often by selling to democracies, rather than generating internal markets.
• Liberal democracy may not in itself provide a framework for real development or for a functioning state.

The first of these points is self-evident. The second is not, and is important, but is  impossible to examine in a piece this length; where are we to find the evidence – in numbers of patents granted, or in the Renaissance and the Medicis?  (PhD, anyone?)

I’m going to look instead at the second two points. In the next few paragraphs I will look at the way in which economic rights have been secured through free debate and the right to organize; and how this has led to the development of internal markets and sustained growth. This is the second dimension of democracy, beyond the simple right to vote. In the final section, I’ll consider a third dimension: forms of democracy that do mobilise social capital, so that people feel their world belongs to them.

Labour, freedom and growth: A case study

Freedom, said Marx, begins once basic requirements have been attained. So does the consumer economy. You cannot live by making goods no-one can afford, so if most people are poor, then most people remain poor. Change requires an external stimulus; cheap raw materials, perhaps, or a lively foreign market for a basic good of which you do have a surplus. This opportunity must then be used to raise living standards to the point where domestic consumption can replace that external stimulus with endogenous growth. For this to happen, people must produce enough to generate a surplus over those basic requirements.

This is effectively what happened in Britain between 1700 and 1900, breaking the vicious circle between poor nutrition, low output, low income, low consumption and poor nutrition. J.D. Chambers, in his elegant 1972 summary Population, economy and society in pre-industrial England, credits a fortuitous break in cycles of disease, but also says: “One aspect of the Industrial Revolution… is that the labour force was not only very much larger but that it was worked very much harder.”

This needed better nutrition. In a 1990 paper, the future Nobel prizewinner Robert Fogel pointed to “the exceeding[ly] low level of work capacity permitted by the [18th century] food supply… The increase in the amount of calories available for work over the past 200 years… increased the labour-force participation rate by bringing [in] the bottom 20% of the consuming units… [who had had] only enough energy… for a few hours of strolling each day – about the amount needed for a career in begging.” He concluded that improvements in nutrition and health had accounted for perhaps 30% of the growth in per capita income in Europe between 1790 and 1980.

So the vicious circle had been broken. But those who controlled food and wages did not permit this out of altruism, or because they had read Fogel. Chambers cites the way in which 18th-century labour combined to obtain better wages. Or as the filmmaker Michael Moore put it in his 1996 polemic, Downsize this!, “When the early unionists stood up to the companies, it resulted in a higher standard of living for all of us… Thanks to labor unions, we have… wages that allow even the most unskilled worker to purchase many products – which, in turn, gives more people jobs.” This process of collective bargaining could not have happened under the Ancien Régime. In effect, one type of human right secured another. In 19th-century Britain, freedom – albeit imperfect, the beginnings of liberal democracy – became more than its own reward. First, the increasing strength of the workforce increased output; and then their right to organize brought the consumer economy.

Free debate was central to this process. Ashton, in The Industrial Revolution (1948), points to the lively discussions on a range of social issues from serfdom in the Scottish coalfields to suppressing the slave trade. Brian Inglis’s absorbing account of the social reforms of the 19th  century, Poverty and the Industrial Revolution (1971), describes the work of MP Michael Sadler in this debate. In 1832 he fielded a Bill to regulate abuse of labour in factories, but was unable to push it through, having lost his seat in the watershed election of that year. In the meantime, however, the evidence collected by the Bill’s Committee had been published, proving, as the Leicester Mercury put it, that “cruel over-working [of children] has in many places been practised… It is horrible, and an outrage on humanity, and decency…”Although Sadler was gone, the uproar forced the new government to pass its own 1833 Factory Act, which for the first time created an independent inspectorate.  Britain never became a workers’ paradise, but that is not the point; rather, it is that democracy allowed the vicious circle of malnutrition to be broken and real growth to begin.

There are parallels in our own time. From 1994, the International Labour Organization cooperated with Indian unions to end exploitation of child labour in a range of sectors including construction, stainless-steel cookware, tea plantations and the brass industry. A side effect was that in the Lower House of the Indian parliament, the Lok Sabha, questions asked about child labour increased in number from about 10 in 1992 to about 25 in 1994 and 37 in 1995. Another modern example concerns the International Convention on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR). On the face of it, it is useless, as it does not bind the signatory states to the observation of such rights. Rather, they agree to pass laws to make the rights conferred by the Convention justiciable – and they do not always do so. However, plaintiffs have used the ICESCR to establish such legal rights in India, South Africa and Switzerland (the South African case concerned housing; the other two, basic subsistence).

More dimensions of democracy

Liberal democracy, then, has its uses, allowing people to expose abuses and sometimes to move the levers of legislation. It also allows them to fight poverty and, in so doing, broadens consumption, making everyone richer.

But too often, democracy will be dominated by élites. In the 2000 US Presidential elections, candidates spent $343 million on their campaigns, while in India, large corporations provided 80% of major parties’ funding in 1996. In the 1992 Philippines Congress, 178 out of 195 members were allegedly millionaires. Thus people are forced to find their own dimension of democracy.

Sometimes they do. One morning in March 1999, an inscribed slab appeared at the entrance to Kamyapeta, an area of 25 villages in Visakhapatnam, in India’s Eastern Ghats. The slab proclaimed Kamyapeta to be a self-ruled republic. This reflected 50 years’ frustration at the refusal of the Andhra Pradesh regional government to connect the area to the outside world with a bridge, so that residents could move their produce to market. In fact when villagers had approached government officials, they had been driven off by the police. After this act of independence, however, the government started building the bridge. In 2002 the prominent Indian NGO, the Centre for Science and Environment, claimed that as many as 1,500 villages in the poorest areas of India might have declared themselves republics and taken control of natural resources. Also in 2002, UNDP reported that the participatory budget-setting programme in the Brazilian city of Porto Alegre had seen the share of households with water services rise from 80% to 98% and those with sanitation from 46% to 85%.

But such processes are not a ‘magic bullet’. They can complement more conventional forms of democracy, but they can’t replace them. As de Tocqueville put it in 1856: “It is unreasonable to suppose that local liberties can be created at will, or maintained for any length of time, when general liberty is extinct.”  In other words, we will always need functioning democratic structures at the national level. 

Moreover, de Tocqueville’s statement is more relevant than ever because both liberal and local democracy are increasingly subordinate to a further dimension – the transnational economy. Between 1980 and 1996 the growth of world trade averaged 6.7% per annum. Since then things have speeded up somewhat. According to the World Trade Organization, total exports of commercial services were worth $1,609,100m in 2002, and $3,846,700m in 2008; after a hiccough following the 2008 crisis, they rose to $4,168,800m in 2011. Merchandise exports rose from $6,492,000m to $18,255,000m over the same period. The WTO states that these two categories grew by 11% and 20% in 2011 alone. This has been accompanied by huge flows of foreign direct investment (FDI). The UN trade organization UNCTAD estimates that FDI flows globally rose from about $13.4m in 1970 to over $54m in 1980 and $207.4m in 1990, to over $1,400,000m in 2000. In recent years there has been some fluctuation (UNCTAD puts FDI flows at a bit over $1,520,000m in 2011). However, the future may see, not contraction in FDI flows, so much as changes in their direction. Could this provoke an extinction of general liberty that would render local process irrelevant?

Globalisation has focused many people’s minds on the governance and increasing power of global institutions. However, a more pressing consequence may be that transnational corporations, as employers, can invest and operate in countries where employees have no rights. The former United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, Mary Robinson, argued that such companies could not easily operate in such environments as their own staff will be harassed; in any case, they would be subject to public opinion in their own markets. This may be only partially true – multinationals are adept at subcontracting, and regulatory mechanisms can be very weak; in any case, 33 ILO member states have still not ratified the 1948 convention on the right to organise.

This may mean that horizontal relationships across national boundaries may become more important that vertical structures within the nation. As the sociologist William Robinson and others have pointed out, individuals’ participation in production may now define their social development, with little reference to their nationality. Indeed some global corporations have their roots in the developing world now, and this has been taken as evidence of a transnational bourgeoisie. The inevitable implication is that people’s experience and interaction should be studied in terms of global class structures. Thus empathy will flow from a middle manager in Surrey to his colleague in Valparaiso while a garment worker in Cambodia will make common cause with another in India, and national mechanisms for decision-making will wither away.

Or will they? Global class-based politics is not a new idea, but as some theorists have realized, managements form transnational links but workforces do not – they are competing for jobs. However, circumstances may force this to change. Trade apart, the global ‘tragedy of the commons’ in resource use means that global governance will have to develop to some extent. This alone means that different forms of identity are bound to emerge, whether they are class-based or not, and through those identities people will develop into actors in the global political arena. Perhaps ironically, it was the anti-globalisation movement that was been one of the first manifestations of this, but social media has brought us more, and looks likely to change the way we think about politics and democracy in ways that we are just beginning to suspect.

Social media enabling a horizontal, global, class-based politics? That is one hell of a new dimension for democracy. Could Lenin’s dreams come true at last, thanks to Facebook? And would they be Lenin’s dreams, or those of an international consumer middle class? But perhaps that’s for another day...

I believe in democracy. But it won’t survive if we persist in understanding it simply as a vertical relationship between ourselves and our government, elected or no. It needs, first, to stand on a moral foundation; and second, to function through horizontal as well as vertical mechanisms.

Which brings me to social capital – the extent of people’s interaction in society, and its impact on governance. But that, too, may have to wait for another day.

Meanwhile, happy new year. And if you’re looking for a Fiat wiper motor on Salisbury Plain, good luck.