Recruiting

It seems common-sensical that knowledge industries of any kind shouldn't limit their hiring to local candidates. Those raised and trained elsewhere bring the benefits of training which may be different and better; they may also bring knowledge of languages and so of the bodies of knowledge available in those languages. I recently spent time at a well-endowed US university year, working under an Australian, sub-letting from an Irishman and then from a Canadian who both worked for the same institution. The more cosmopolitan the field of study, the more international the workforce: thus, among the fifty or so tenured or tenure-track staff in Economics at the same university, there's a Greek, a Canadian, an Icelander, three Germans, a Chinese woman, a Chilean, a Brazilian, four Italians, two Belarussians, three Japanese, a Frenchman, a Turk, an Argentine, a New Zealander, an Englishman, and an Indian. That university is private and blessed with hotlines to US visa offices, as I know from personal experience. As an comparative exercise, it might make more sense to look at large, publicly funded universities in second cities, like Birmingham in the UK and Montreal in Canada. Here's a link to a list of U of Birmingham Economics faculty, where you'll find a Dane, an Italian, and at least two Indians; and to a similar list for the Department of Economics at McGill University in Montreal, home to a Spaniard, a Moroccan, a Scot, an Englishman, a Japanese, five Americans, an Australian, a Dutchman, a Thai, and a Chinese man. How does this compare with the largest institution in the Catalan university system, the huge Universitat de Barcelona? To be fair, the UB has more faculty in Economics that any of the three examples in the US, the UK and Canada. For the sake of comparison, then, I've chosen the most international (in subject matter, at least) of their Economics departments, which teaches economic policy and the structure of the world economy. The staff list is here.

Notice anything? CVs are not listed (they're likewise absent from the Department's home page), so we have to go on names and surnames. That said, the list looks very local. One staff member out of forty-eight does not have two surnames. She is a visiting professor. Otherwise, it looks a lot like a closed shop.

(Not all Barcelona universities recruit quite as locally as the UB: the UPF's Economics department is fairly international in provenance and training. )

Universities are not free to hire anyone with a PhD: candidates for full, permanent posts must have been vetted by a public agency in charge of assessing academic output. The process takes six months. More about that tomorrow.

Heritage Language Classes

This post is unfair.

When I came to Spain, talk of immigration actually meant talk of emigration: of internal migration, especially in the 1960s, of Spanish guest workers in Germany, Republican exiles in France or Mexico, and economic migrants to Argentina or Chile. Now immigration means newcomers to Spain, who make up about 12% of the population. Immigrants brings skills that exporters need. By speaking Russian, Chinese, Polish, or Urdu to their children, they are passing on language skills and cosmopolitanism. Those skills are desperately needed. Language teaching is poor in Spain, and attitudes towards language learning contradictory (as reported in the following story from last Friday's La Vanguardia):

About six years ago I met a highly educated Russian woman at a central Barcelona playground. She was speaking to her daughter, who might have been four, in lightly accented but fluent Catalan. (Her Catalan was better than the Catalan premier's, but that's another post.) She told me that she'd been told, by a teacher at a public school, to give up speaking to her daughter in Russian. Her daughter will have no access to the Russian language in the public educational system until she enters university.

Here comes the unfair part. In polities whose experience of immigration is long and intense, policy makers know enough to use public schools to preserve immigrant languages. Heritage language teaching, as its known, can mean a dual-language school-day in New York, in Spanish, Chinese, Russian, Korean and French. In Toronto, free after-school classes are on offer in fifty languages, from Danish and Armenian to Marathi and Yiddish. Is it fair to ask Barcelona to mimic New York and Toronto? I suppose not, but it is necessary. If Catalan policy makers wake up to the potential of their young charges in time, the Catalan economy will stand a better chance of finding its niches and prospering. If they allow their teachers to discourage trilingualism and do nothing to raise awareness of the importance of heritage languages, a vital opportunity will have been lost.

Recommended

Three related pieces: in the Economist, "Why is Spain so Corrupt?"; in El País, "Por qué hay tanta corrupción en España," of which the former is a gloss, by the political scientist Victor Lapuente Giné; and a short opinion piece in today's Vanguardia by Jordia Barbeta on the parliamentary representation of those Catalans who have been without electricity since last Monday's snowfall. Barbeta points out that the snowed-in towns have no effective voice in Barcelona or Madrid because they are without local representation. Barbeta doesn't suggest scrapping proportional representation as practised in Spain; I do.

Politics and Culture

This will be a bit of a ramble, but the point I need to make is hard to put into words.

One commonplace about cold countries is that people huddle together through the months of cold and snow. In Spain, and perhaps throughout Mediterranean Europe, people huddle together through the years of unemployment and recession. Last year the Spanish unemployment rate stood at 18%, the Catalan rate at 16%. Both have since gone up. It's common to hear talk of 20% unemployment. Youth unemployment was hovering near 40% last summer. By comparison, rates in the Netherlands and Germany have stayed under 5% and 10% respectively.

We're told that the story behind faltering or negative growth and very high unemployment is one of a boom (in property development) and bust. The Spanish economy has gone cold turkey, a junkie whose supply of junk abruptly failed. The back story, which also gets some press, is one of low productivity and slight innovation, a meagre skills base and failing or struggling schools. Yesterday my devoted reader told me that responsibility and the value of hard work are not inculcated in young people here because Spain is relatively rich, because of the nanny state, and because of that older, more comprehensive social safety net called the family. (Her unstated corollary is that parents and grandparents do work very hard and are highly responsible, in their families.) Families have kept society going: so far, we've seen few protests and little extremism. But the virtues of private life may be vices in public life. The sociability that serves families so well may not translate into good governance.

What I'm getting at is the way political institutions shape culture. In Westminster democracies and the United States the electoral process is formally a choice of individuals over other individuals; and, for good or ill, such countries are noted for their individualism. Sweden has enjoyed two centuries of free public access to information and enjoys one of the cleanest political cultures on Earth. So my question is this: how has Spain shaped itself, culturally, by instituting the systems of democratic governance under which it is now ruled, and under which it has been ruled since the end of the 1970s? Is there anything about public life as conducted under the set of rules then agreed upon that has benefited Spaniards, in their education and their attitudes, in the last thirty years? Has Spanish politics been good for the culture of Spain?

Power without Scrutiny

Under its current electoral system, Spain encourages voters to do what marketing encourages them to do on their outings to hypermarkets: judge the brand, not the product. Take the Madrid Assembly, which oversees the regional government of a single Spanish province. As provinces, drawn on the map in 1833, are also Spain's electoral districts, there is a single electoral district for elections to the Madrid Assembly, and one hundred and twenty seats. Are the media, the party rank-and-file, and voters able scrutinise candidates individually? (Three major parties run three-hundred-and-sixty candidates; a fourth party is likely to do likewise in the next regional election.) Can they judge the work of regional MPs individually--judge four years of work by one hundred and twenty people?

Now imagine the region divided into one hundred and twenty seats, with a population of just under 60,000 each, using a mandated alternative vote system for both party primaries in each district and for the regional election itself. The party rank-and-file in each district would chose one individual out of however many threw in their hats; in such small districts, internal party campaigning would be quite cheap, and in any case expenditure could be limited by law to keep the process modest and fair. Electors would choose from among four major-party candidates and an unforeseeable number of minor party candidates. Each election would constitute a referendum on the continuity of the sitting member for the district after four years of legislative and advocacy work.

If it is not the point of elections to choose representatives--to choose people--we might as well adopt a virtual system, giving each party buttons to push in parliamentary votes rather than bums on seats. As it is, most of those bums are unknown to voters, and all of them are beholden more to their party bosses than to the constituents they are supposed to represent.

L'Europe n'existe pas

Do Europeans share any experiences, apart from Euro-elections (for which the turnout is always low), a song contest, the European Cup and travel? They don't share television. Digital broadcasting has meant many, many more channels. In the UK, there are nearly one hundred; in Spain and France around forty, depending on where one lives. (There had been fewer than ten free analogue broadcasters in the same markets.) Have any of the new licenses gone to channels which are European in scope, such as the Lyon-based multilingual broadcaster Euronews? Nope. Or to national public broadcasters from elsewhere in Europe, such as the BBC, Italy's RAI, or France Télévisions? Nope. Or to the international news and information brands of some of those same broadcasters, such as BBC World and France 24? Nope. So Europeans are told they should speak two languages in addition to their mother tongue, but must pay for media content in the languages they are encouraged to learn. So public-service broadcasters struggle to provide content for the new channels they have been allotted, yet the cheap alternative of simply carrying a feed from elsewhere in Europe has been passed over. And, in the symbolic realm of the channel surf, Europe does not exist.

Beat the Drum Slowly

The mayor and council of our fair city have seen fit to pay for a multimedia campaign promoting the city to itself, mentioned in my first post. The campaign has a website, www.viscabarcelona.cat. All the pictures are of young people, and the aesthetic reminds me of a twenty-something niece's Facebook page (albeit against a black background). The city is cool, the site tells us (visually, at least), because it is home to twenty-something men who leap and don't wear belts and twenty-something women whose teeth, blessed with a startling whiteness, photograph well at close quarters. The 30- and 60-second television commercials that are running, have run, or ran to reinforce the campaign I must have missed, but they live on in cyberspace. Among other features are interviews with luminaries of the local star system ("Why do you love this city so much?") and a sort of BCNtube, open to uploaded video and voting, the visible On-line Person's Approval Factor. It doesn't seem to be popular: the winning video, out of fewer than twenty, has forty-two votes.

How much did all of this cost? Apart from a city hall logo and link to the City of Barcelona homepage, the Visc(a) Barcelona site has no "Contact us" link, no postal address, no terms of use, and no statement of responsibility. Thus there's no way of knowing where to look for this expense in the city budget and it hasn't been reported.

Window Dressing

Valencia is home to the world's only museum of the Enlightenment, the Museu Valencià de la Il·lustració i la Modernitat (MuVIM). I've not been there and what I know of the exhibitions is hearsay. The museum's webpage, meant to be cool, is clumsy, but I've heard of good academic work sponsored by the MuVIM, and am glad to see the Enlightenment given a platform of any kind.

When the word 'modernity' was added to the name of the institution room was made for more than just historiography, and so the MuVIM hosts exhibitions that are not curated historiographically. For the last seven years it's hosted an annual show of press photographs sponsored by the local press club, the Unió de Periodistes Valencians. This year's show opened last Thursday. The Head of Culture for the Province of Valenica, controlled (as are the city and regional governments) by the right-0f-centre Popular Party, took exception to photographs of political fellow-travellers and issue with the inclusion of photographs of politicians in an exhibition of press photographs. He ordered the offending images removed:

They were removed. The museum's director, on leave from a university post (he holds a chair in Aesthetics), resigned; the press club removed the rest of the photographs. The catalogue of the show is available on-line in Catalan, Spanish and English. It refers to on-going investigations into cases of alleged corruption, run-of-the-mill stuff in the press, and this was a show of work by press photographers.

The irony of censorship at a museum of the Enlightenment seems not have been lost on the political class. There's a delicious quote in La Vangaurdia from the president of the Province of Valencia, so delicious, so simple and so revealing that I'll leave it in Spanish: "una cosa es la libertad de expresión y otra la libertad de opinión".

Special Pages

This morning my devoted reader pointed out that La Vanguardia began to back the city's 2022 Olympic bid just a few weeks after it was made public. When the paper was thicker and private-sector ad revenue healthier--say, in 2008--La Vanguardia was a thorn in city hall's side, running strings of features for weeks at a time highlighting problems that had arisen from, or weren't addressed by, municipal policy. It could afford to. Now it can't. The largest advertisers in today's issue of the paper are La Vanguardia itself (its marketing branch and sister businesses in the same media group) and the public sector. A six-page special report for International Women's Day, headed "Páginas especiales" and placed by the Catalan Government in collaboration with the Province of Barcelona, will have cost over 100,000 euros. (I've taken the rates from http://www.publipressmedia.com/images/

stories/medios/1/1/tarifas/LA%2520VANGUARDIA.pdf.) Most of the articles in the report aren't signed; a few of them detail policy initiatives, but most cover things La Vanguardia reports on anyway. It's tailored reporting, and would be praise-worthy in itself if it weren't tailored by the state. Will La Vanguardia bite the hand that feeds? I doubt it will more than nip.

Travails of a Party Man

Among the wonders of the party-list electoral systems is the wandering politico, freed from the burdens of rootedness and local representation. Where slates are unknown, candidates with no local connection are said to have parachuted into a race. Parachutes are used when parties want to get someone into elected office and turn to safe seat or district, banking on party loyalty to overcome the candidate's tenuous connection. I doubt the issue is ever decisive, but at least it is an issue.

In Spain, all elections are impersonal, and constituencies ideological rather than local. Thus, in city politics, there are no wards or boroughs: national parties run city-wide slates. The head of the slate is the party's mayoral candidate. In the 1999, the head of the right-of-centre People's Party's slate in the Barcelona election was Santiago Fisas, a former golf champion and local lawyer who had held two successive appointments under the same party in the Spanish government from 1996 to 1999. Fisas ran unsuccessfully for a Barcelona senate seat in 2000; by July 2002 his departure from city politics was leaked. Late in 2003 he reappeared as a regional minister in Madrid, though he had not been and never was elected to the regional assembly and had not resided in Madrid for more than four of his then fifty-five years. He's now a Euro MP in Brussels; he has asked three questions. In Spain, political careers happen first and foremost in parties, not in public.

Headliners

The City of Barcelona puts out a monthly bulletin on glossy paper. I get it at home. We all get it at home--it's mailed to us. There are colour photographs on every page and the headlines are large. The headers--white characters red boxes--match those of the web page and advertising campaigns of the party that has governed the city, in coalitions, since 1979.

Informació Barcelona has a mission statement, available on line at http://w3.bcn.es/V38/Home/V38HomeLinkPl/0,3526,57975652_57993888_1,00.html. It's ostensibly meant to give citizens useful information about city services. That is, anyway, the written norm. The unwritten norms are "Publish headlines the mayor would love to see in the local press" and "Get the mayor into as many photographs, headlines and stories as possible without seeming a fanzine." In the March issue, the mayor's face appears seven times in twenty-four pages and his name at least twelve. Some examples: in an interview with the head of a music school who'd been given a medal for thirty years of hard work, the first question mentions the mayor. Rather than beginning with "Last February you were given a medal..." the piece begins "Last February the mayor, Jordi Hereu, gave you a medal." A design school affiliated with a local university has moved into a renovated building, part of the downtown campus. The mayor is in the piece and the picture, and gets the first quote. A new municipal gym is up and running: the mayor occupies the subject slot in the first sentence of the article, and the sight lines in the accompanying photograph converge on his smiling face. The mayor is not omnipresent, but his team is. Every piece on a city programme or service features a quote from an alderman or alderwoman holding a post at city hall.

This month's issue is actually remarkable for the mayor's low profile: in February, his name appeared twenty-three times in the first twelve pages, and the word "alcalde" (mayor) thirty-three times. And, yes, he made the cover.

Why Accountability Matters

Accountability is basic to any account of liberal democracy. Politicians do not have tenure. They serve at the pleasure of their constituents. We rely on judges to determine whether the conduct of politicians is legal, but to decide whether it is proper we must rely on ourselves. Of equal importance is the example of political accountability. Disgraced, unsuccessful or unwanted politicians are not consigned to ignominy of a return to civil society. They are moved about, sent to Brussels (Vidal-Quadras, Borrell), made ambassadors (Clos) or executives of companies whose viability depends on state licensing or concessions (Piqué, Macià Alavedra). In as much as they are part of the party, they are all too big to fail. The few exceptions are exceptionally talented (Miquel Roca) or of exceptionally rigid principles (Julio Anguita). What message does this convey? What example does it set? It tells us that actions have mitigated consequences, that responsibility can be evaded or deflected, and blame washed away; that group membership and cohesion count for more than individual conduct. Conduct becomes a matter of doing what one can get away with rather than what one should be done. These attitudes carry over from public into private life. If those in the public eye, subject to scrutiny, can evade responsibility--if their wiggle room is almost infinite--how can we hope to install a sense of responsibility elsewhere?

By way of example: the large organisation for which I work attracts people from all over Europe and, increasingly, from China. The work I oversee entails a great deal of writing, and much of it is fraudulent: plagiarised or barely paraphrased. Every confrontation over the issue plays out the same way: I'm given excuses, told that the offending passage was copied out of an old notebook, or that original work was not expected in the Catalan or German or Italian setting with whose norms the individual was better acquainted (mine, it seems, come as a surprise). Nobody admits to wrong-doing or apologises. One day a young Chinese woman came to my office. Her work was original and ambitious. I'd already told her how impressed I was, but she wanted me to talk her through her reasoning and her writing from beginning to end. "So I guess I have to work harder," she said when we were done. If her attitude is characteristically Chinese, Europe stands in need of a little Chinese acculturation.

Borrell, Rajoy, and Primaries

My devoted reader buttonholed me again with a reminder that the PSC's sister party, the PSOE, had held open primaries in 1998. (A primary is open when voters are given more than one candidate for whom they may vote.) The winner, Josep Borrell, was hounded out of office by the party nomenklatura within thirteen months and succeeded by the man he had defeated in an open democratic process. It was the political equivalent of one of Goya's black paintings, reminiscent of the apocryphal stories told about Lyndon Johnson's early campaigns. His successor's successor, Rodríguez Zapatero, did not compete in primaries. He won the post of party general secretary at conference for which delegates were elected by party members, but the electoral process is not one in which candidates campaign openly for delegates who then commit to them. With the general secretariat came parliamentary party leadership and candidacy for prime ministership.

The leader of the opposition, Mariano Rajoy, was chosen by the man he succeeded, in the manner of second-century AD Roman emperors. The choice was rubber-stamped by the party hierarchy within days. Rajoy has left very little doubt as to the party's procedure for choosing slates of candidates for upcoming elections: "I draw up the lists," he stated bluntly last November. At least he's honest. The implication, though, is that all authority in the party flows down always, with no correctives. Aznar picked Rajoy, Rajoy picks the candidates, and their order in each slate. Thumbs up, thumbs down: some are assured a seat, some are sure that they won't get a seat, and a few live with real doubt until election night.

PSC Primaries?

Yesterday's La Vanguardia carried a story suggesting that the PSC might--might, not will--hold primary elections to chose the party's candidate for the post of Catalan premier in the upcoming election. Bundles with the primary was some kind of democratic opening up of the party's process for choosing its other 134 candidates for parliamentary seats, which was to have been the subject of today's post. Three observations: firstly, this is a trial balloon and may come to nothing; second, if there are primaries and only one candidate stands for election, the process will mean nothing more than its own staging; third, the only primaries the PSC has ever held to choose a candidate, in 1999, were likewise a one-candidate affair. One candidate does not an election make: election means choice.

The Streaks of the Tulip

My devoted reader button-holed me for a minute yesterday to let me know that my blog reads like an anti-PSC screech. It's true that I've been writing against the art of politics in the PSC for the better part of a week. But I haven't done so out of animus. I've been writing about it because it stares me squarely in the face: it's in power in five of the six levels of government that determine and carry out public policy affecting me and my family. And the PSC is the sort of party I'd like to be able to vote for (and have voted for). I'll turn my attention to other parties, to the media, and to more open and democratic practices over time. My thesis is not about the PSC alone: I hold that the structures of democratic politics in Spain, in place and largely unaltered since the late 1970s, were inappropriate for an immature democracy and have created democratic deficits and disaffection. I'll continue to pursue the theme because I believe in liberal democracy, not in the abstract, but in the here and now. Here and now is where I live.

Who Chose José Montilla? (continued)

Yesterday I began to examine the quality of the democratic processes that gave José Montilla his job as party leader. Today I'd like to examine Montilla's status as an elected official. Montilla is a career politician, a party man. He was first elected in 1979, in the first freely contested municipal election since the death of Franco, and has known no other profession. He never completed a university degree. He is a pure creature of party politics as practised in Spain since the late 1970s.

Montilla is a deputy in the Catalan parliament. He was not elected individually: he was part of a slate, a list, and voters had no opportunity to vote for individuals from various party lists. Montilla's party put forth eighty-five candidates for the eighty-five seats accorded to Barcelona, the most populous of Catalonia's four electoral districts. If voters should be dissatisfied with Mr Montilla's work as a deputy, as party leader, or as premier, there is no mechanism allowing them to direct that dissatisfaction at him directly. It's all or nothing: not voting for Montilla means not voting for the party, and the other eighty-four names on the list. In practice, this means that only his party--which he controls--can unseat him. As long as parties can gauge how many safe seats they have, the nominees at the top of the party list have nothing to worry about. They are accountable to the party for their jobs; if they please or run the party, they have jobs for life. So Mr Montilla, who is the general secretary of his party as well as premier is effectively accountable to himself alone, rather like God.