Sir Winston Churchill’s book My Early Life (1874-1904) [known in North America as “A Roving Commission (1930)”] reads that, in the spring of 1896, a 22-year-old officer of the 4th Hussars could enjoy his life preparatory to sailing for India in the autumn: “Society still existed in its old form. It was a brilliant and powerful body, with standards of conduct and methods of enforcing them now altogether forgotten. In a very large degree everyone knew everyone else and who they were. The few hundred great families who had governed England for so many generations and had seen her rise to the pinnacle of her glory, were inter-related to an enormous extent by marriage. Everywhere one met friends and kinsfolk. The leading figures of Society were in many cases the leading statesmen in Parliament, and also the leading sportsmen on the Turf.”
The way Sir Winston Churchill describes the “few hundred great families” that ruled Great Britain at the time (with a population constituting one-fourth of that of the world and with a territory one-fourth of that of the planet) reminds one of John Locke’s treatise entitled Some Thoughts Concerning Education [1693].
However, the situation had changed over a couple of decades and Sir Winston Churchill, much to his chagrin, was brought up to speed by Paul Cambon who had spent over 20 years as Ambassador of France to the United Kingdom: “When in 1920 Mr. Paul Cambon brought to an end his long, memorable mission to the Court of St. James’s, he was good enough to come to luncheon at my house. The talk turned upon the giant events through which we had passed and the distance the world had traveled since the beginning of the century. ‘In the twenty years I have been here,’ said the aged Ambassador, ‘I have witnessed an English Revolution more profound and searching than the French Revolution itself. The governing class has been almost entirely deprived of political power, and to a very large extent of its property and estates, and this has been accomplished almost imperceptibly and without the loss of a single life.’ I suppose this is true.”
Proof of this is found in the BBC’s Downton Abbey series.
Almost a hundred years after the event, we seem to be witness to as deep-reaching changes. Noted politicians, such as Konrad Adenauer, Ludwig Erhard, Alcide De Gasperi, Robert Schuman, Charles de Gaulle, ruled Europe after World War II. Today, we don’t see such figures. Quite recently, it was believed that such charismatic leaders could be replaced by political technocrats. If so, then the rule-of-the-best notion has, since 1896, changed its meaning three times. First, “the best” were the aristocratic families that ruled their empires for hundreds of years. Second, there were all those charismatic politicians who kept rebuilding Europe after WW II, with a worldview formed in the “good old times.” Messrs. Adenauer, Gasperi, Schuman, and de Gaulle were devout Catholics. Konrad Adenauer was a founding father of the German Christian Union and Alcide De Gasperi was one of the Italy’s Christian Democratic Party. For those politicians, the Christian ethics and social doctrine of the Roman Catholic Church was just so many ideas they could use to form a new Europe that would discard the Nazi heritage and resist the communist temptations. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, they started being replaced by others’ “rule of the best.” People were coming to power, owing to their talent and academic degrees. They had a different worldview. In 1958, Michael Young, a British sociologist and politician, published his satirical essay entitled The Rise of the Meritocracy. It was about a future society that would be ruled by “the best,” namely intellectuals and experts in their respective fields. “Rule of the best” has since spread on a broad scale. In fact, the current generation of European politicians could figure in these standings, with several reservations.
On January 17, 2017, The New York Times carried their trusted Bulgarian contributor Ivan Krastev’s feature entitled “The Rise and Fall of European Meritocracy.” The heading is strongly reminiscent of Michael Young’s book title. He tried to analyze the latest trends in Europe’s populist movement: “This is what European political, business and news media leaders have done in response to the populist wave that is sweeping the old Continent. … They are shocked that many of their compatriots are voting for irresponsible demagogues. They find it difficult to understand the sources of the rage against the meritocratic elites best symbolized by the well-trained, competent civil servants in Brussels. ... The paradox of the current political crisis in Europe is rooted in the fact that the Brussels elites are blamed for the same reasons that they praised themselves for: their cosmopolitanism, their resistance to public pressure and their mobility. In Europe, the meritocratic elite is a mercenary elite, not unlike the way the best soccer players are traded around to the most successful clubs across the Continent. … European institutions and banks, just like soccer clubs, spend colossal amounts of money acquiring the best ‘players.’ But what happens when these teams start to lose or the economy slows down? Their fans abandon them. That’s because there’s no relationship connecting the ‘players’ and their fans beyond celebrating victories…”
Mr. Krastev offers what I would call an oversimplified answer to the question: Why so many Europeans are feeling so poorly about the meritocratic elites? He believes that the main reason is on an emotional level. He says that “unconditional loyalty to ethnic, religious or social groups – that is at the heart of the appeal of Europe’s new populism. The populists promise people not to judge them based solely on their merits. They promise solidarity but not necessarily justice… They promise to re-establish the national and ideological constraints that were removed by globalization. In short, what populists promise their voters is not competence but intimacy. They promise to re-establish the bond between the elites and the people. And many in Europe today find this promise appealing.”
I think that there is an important aspect to what Mr. Krastev had to say. He dealt not only with the political crisis in Europe, but also with that of the existing elites, their concepts, the fact that people are losing confidence in them. However, his analysis offers practically no answers to any acute questions. To begin with, not all of the existing elites match his criteria – I mean his “competent civil servants in Brussels” and “Brussels elites.” Second, the sudden change in the European moods remains to be explained. What made them place solidarity and ethnic identity above competent technocrats as managers?
Mr. Krastev proposes to see political realities under the harsh light of dichotomy, choosing between a cosmopolitan elite (competent management, universal values, rational approach) and national/ethnic elites (solidarity, keeping loyal to religious/ethnic communities, allowing for an irrational ideology that supports isolationism and separatism). I think that this is the wrong kind of dichotomy, that it allows the apologists of political liberalism to avoid discussions dealing with acute political issues. The liberals accuse the populists of engineering phobias in order to manipulate public opinion. And this considering that the liberals are producing new phobias meant to portray their opponents as nincompoops guided by envy of others’ talent and success. It follows that the meritocrats constitute liberal elites, with the liberals being their opponents, determined to weaken their power, taking advantage of the common folk’s credulity, emotions, even instinct. It appears that all the meritocrats can do is teach, enlighten the masses, thus demonstrating their genuine advantage. What we see is a remake of the 18th century Enlightenment “upgraded” by the Marxists.
Many in Ukraine still believe that we can make progress by hiring managers. This began by hiring media people from abroad [mostly from Russia]. For quite some time they have acted as hosts of the leading Ukrainian television channels. We have watched them over the past two years. Result: negligible. Past December, New Zealand’s ex-Finance Minister Ruth Richardson said in an interview with a Ukrainian periodical that if we wanted reforms and if we expected foreign top managers to carry them out for us, we would be bitterly disappointed in the end. Reforms aren’t carried out that way, she said, adding that foreigners could write a status quo scenario and help us make a facelift in the state of Ukraine. This allows one to take another look at Mr. Krastev’s feature. What if his meritocrats aren’t the way he describes them? What if they aren’t that effective? What if Europe’s current political crisis is part of their plan? If so, all those populists are the first consequence of a crisis that hasn’t reached its peak.
I started by quoting from Sir Winston Churchill’s My Early Life, where he mentions rule of the best, people who ruled Great Britain and kept it on top of the world for several centuries. Much water has run under the bridge, with drastic changes occurring in the UK, Europe, and across the globe.
Questions remain: Rule of the best? Who is to be qualified as the best to rule a given country? How and where? Is it possible to implement this rule under the existing conditions? Answers to these questions may well change our near future.
