“The U.S. has been a reasonably successful steward of world peace along some dimensions, no doubt, but we seem to be particularly bad at colonialism for reasons the Battle of Tora Bora perhaps highlights- once a government (or even loosely affiliated military group) is in theory our ally, under our tutelage and cooperating with our military machine, we seem to have no ability to view its actions or abilities objectively. Maybe the reason Britain was, all-in-all more successful as a colonial power despite never exerting the kind of world military dominance the U.S. has since World War II is that, as representatives of a class-based and explicitly hierarchical society, the Eton boys running things for Britain never felt tempted to the kinds of faux egalitarianism that often guides American colonial ventures astray. In his excellent if self-indulgent account of walking across Afghanistan immediately after the Taliban’s fall, The Places in Between, Rory Stewart (an Eton boy turned world traveler and, later, an Iraq War provincial administrator and Tory MP) describes the policy wonks eager to take the reins of the new Central Asian Switzerland in 2001:
For the last three months, whenever I reached an internet cafe, I had received an email from someone who had gone to govern Afghanistan. They started passing the UN application forms around in 2001 and then the circulars appeared: “Please don’t expect to write to this email – there is no internet connection in Kabul. ” Finally, there were messages from new addresses “@pak.id” “@afghangov.org” “‘@worldbank.org” “@un.org,” talking about the sun in the mountains. I now had half a dozen friends working in embassies, thinktanks, international development agencies, the UN and the Afghan government, controlling projects worth millions of dollars. A year before they had been in Kosovo or East Timor and in a year’s time they would have been moved to Iraq or Washington or New York.
Their objective was (to quote the United Nations Assistance Mission for Afghanistan) “The creation of a centralised, broad-based, multi-ethnic government committed to democracy, human rights and the rule of law”. They worked twelve- or fourteen- hour days, drafting documents for heavily-funded initiatives on “democratisation”, “enhancing capacity”, “gender”, “sustainable development,” “skills training” or “protection issues”. They were mostly in their late twenties or early thirties, with at least two degrees – often in international law, economics or development. They came from middle class backgrounds in Western countries and in the evenings they dined with each other and swapped anecdotes about corruption in the Government and the incompetence of the United Nations. They rarely drove their 4WDs outside Kabul because they were forbidden to do so by their security advisers. There were people who were experienced and well informed about conditions in rural areas of Afghanistan. But such people were barely fifty individuals out of many thousands. Most of the policy makers knew next to nothing about the villages where 90% 0f the population of Afghanistan lived. They came from post-modern, secular, globalised states with liberal traditions in law and government. It was natural for them to initiate projects on urban design, women’s rights and fibre-optic cable networks, to talk about transparent, clean and accountable processes, tolerance and civil society and to speak of a people “who desire peace at any cost and understand the need for a centralised multi-ethnic government”.”
Exactly!
We recently wrote:
“10: The last component, most central to public management, involved a broadly ‘professional’ and proto-bureaucratic vision of government.
Good public management in this vision involves staffing the state bureaucracy by permanent salaried middle-class professionals, recruited by examination rather than by patronage or sale of office (as with the adoption of civil service examinations in Prussia from 1770), and with a college training in economics and public management.
Professionalization goes with formalization, for good public management needs mechanisms for making sure that public officials carry out their duties properly and according to law.
NC not only is extremely critical of modern bureaucratic government and the salaried middle-class professionals who staff it but rejects this “vision of government” in its entirety.
Nevertheless, Moldbug said very little as to where a new “staff” might come from and how they might be trained. However, looking for such a thing is perhaps a mistake. Moldbug once described the role of the sovereign CEO as a “contractor of contractors”. Many talented people already exist and are capable of governance “straight out of the box” so to speak; thus, the task is to find them and given them enough power and responsibility to do what needs to be done.
SC, however, theoretically explores the training, experience and selection of such a staff which is similar to the Roman “course of honours” of antiquity. (The following is a good “data point” to consider.)”
