De administratione populoque Part II - About securing power and maintaining stability

I did say that stability is becoming more inherent in the world. Nevertheless, when governments come under attack from their own citizens – it does happen every so often in times of upheaval and change – the government needs an alternative plan, should things go wrong. The plan must do these things.

1. It must re-affirm government control.

2. It must stop dissenting voices.

3. It must regain people’s attention.

The answer is not sending the riot police into the streets. It is not about sending tanks and soldiers to massacre its own people. Instead, the long-term, stable solution proves to be the most effective. That solution is bureaucracy, a system of functionaries and administration to insure that administration itself is protected. It is why every single developed stable country has one, and is only destroyed by military combat, itself prevented by bureaucracy.

Bureaucracy and public servants are the most important group of people in any government or institution; elected politicians, elected for the sake of stability no less, come and go. Perhaps there is a correlation between grand buildings such as the Houses of Parliament, and the non-descript offices of Whitehall. The Houses of Parliament, and indeed other Parliament buildings and grand palaces, act as a façade, in order to display importance and thus hide the contrary truth. Meanwhile, the real important figures of government are situated in ordinary offices which blend into their surroundings in the form of rows of either glass-and-steel boxes or typical Victorian blocks. Or perhaps the headquarters of the Highways Agency or Public Health England have the most extravagant building in London that I haven’t found out about, I digress. Meanwhile, those unelected worker bees continue to sort files, formulate and realise government policy, without a single blink of an eye by any journalist or enquirer. That is the beauty of bureaucracy.

Alexis de Tocqueville said, “The most dangerous moment for a bad government is when it begins to reform.” Thus, for a bad government to reform a bureaucracy is a move only the stupidest of fools dare make. It is why the 19^th century bureaucracy of Russia in all its imperial glory would be the foundations of the bureaucracy that would allow Stalin, the epitome of despotism and hated by his own family and some would argue by Lenin himself, to protect his power even during the most horrifying moments of his rule. If there is one thing that Stalin can be credited for in Russia – and the Russians themselves can think of many other things – it is that Stalin created stability after the October Revolution and then after the death of Lenin through mass industrialisation and the rebuilding of Soviet cities. However, part of his plan was to increase his own power and in doing so, he made the Soviet Union an extension of his own character. The means in which he reached this goal were barbaric – the famines in the Ukraine, the deaths of thousands of political prisoners some of whom died during construction of projects such as the Moscow Metro, the executions and ill-treatment of at up to a million Soviet officials and the attempted Doctor’s Plot whereby Jewish doctors would be blamed for a string of high-profile deaths and subsequently lead to an anti-Semitic movement, the latter cancelled only by the death of Stalin himself.  You can see the papers drafted by bureaucrats detailing the death warrants of hundreds of functionaries and generals, with Stalin’s signature of approval. The same system in Russia is used by one Vladimir Putin today, a man like many of his Soviet predecessors; revered by his people sometimes to the point of cult following, helped by a strong bureaucratic state, and, combined with the increasing incomes of the Russian middle-class, his leadership is kept strong and his power continues to be consolidated, much to the chagrin of the rest of the group of oligarchs of which he himself was once a member.

The use of bureaucracy as a backup can even develop, or mutate, into an outright scapegoat. It is why, for instance, Adam Curtis, the BBC blogger and filmmaker who continues to fascinate me, described Yes Minister as propaganda, citing that the Civil Service, the neutral functionaries responsible for the execution of government policy, were betrayed as obstacles to good government and thus their absence would allow the government, such as that of Margaret Thatcher, to push on her suppression of the miners’ strike with popular support or the equally divisive policies. Indeed, the use of bureaucracy as a scapegoat is widespread in British government, considering that they are required to be non-partisan. It is even said that the Blair Government, upon entering office in 1997, seemed to have based their approach to civil servants on Yes Minister, to outfox and subvert them. The failure in the West Coast rail franchise was blamed on the mistakes of civil servants, even if the Transport Secretary had been replaced. The ability of bureaucracy to prop up and to protect a state is invaluable to any government, good or bad.

Stability and bureaucracy go hand in hand – they are both symbols of a self-aware post-ideological world. Centrism, a mixture of left- and right-wing philosophies at the top of the horse-shoe political spectrum, seems to be the dish of the decade in world politics, and sets to continue into this era. Indeed, it is the most pragmatic option: to keep both sides of humanity – the individuals themselves and the organisations in which they operate – happy. It does not matter for any country or its system whether there is a formal declaration of public approval or not; people still feel, in a democratic or undemocratic country, that their view is important. It is just that most of the time people have no opinion; democracy can be considered unnecessary in the right conditions, such as states of emergency and war. However, we can still sleep soundly in the clear correlation that an intense dislike of a government leads to its eventual removal; it does not need to mean that the surface may disintegrate, the skeleton of government may remain, such as bureaucracy; however the muscles, the organs and the soul of power will have disintegrated nonetheless. Who can say that the Communist Party of China is truly communist, either in the traditional Marxist-Leninist or the derivative Maoist context? How many political parties have the words “democratic” or “democracy” in the name, regardless of actual conviction and practice?

However, that does not mean that I am in favour of an authoritarian banana republic-style dictatorship in this country, nor for any country in the Western world, for that would be fundamentally unstable.