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From the November 2005 Anthropology News The Role of Sovereign Cliques in the Derailing of Democracy Janine R Wedel Evaluating democracy promotion and diplomacy are important endeavors, but first we must understand the ambiguous world in which we live. Since the early 1980s my fieldwork in Eastern Europe and the US has focused on linkages between state and private roles in the allocation of resources and ideologies of political systems. Studying social networks in the provision of assistance and governing, I have seen the transformation of the roles and rules of both, a transformation that has the power to derail democracy. After 1989, as the communist regimes were collapsing in Eastern Europe, I began analyzing the established informal social networks skilled at circumventing and accessing the crumbling communist state to attain companies and other resources at a bargain. The members of these networks and groups, I noted, were adept at shifting between state and private roles, and conflating the interests of both. They were skilled at relaxing both market competition and any government accountability. I named these groups “sovereign cliques” after their ability to penetrate key institutions and restructure them to exclude other potential players and control agendas. (I used the term “flex groups” for the same concept in a Washington Post op-ed, “Flex Sovereign: A Capital Way to Gain Clout, Inside and Out,” published this past December and continued to consider new descriptive possibilities.) Sovereign cliques in Eastern Europe quickly learned that playing multiple roles—both in official government and with a consulting firm or NGO—helped them position themselves for wealth and influence in the emerging system. Polish sociologists dubbed these boundary shifters “institutional nomads,” because they were loyal primarily to their fellow nomads and their common interests, rather than to the institutions they worked for. These boundary shifters’ flexing of their influence in unraveling communist states obviously differs from what occurs in stable societies such as the US. American laws and regulations, for example, are intended to prevent an individual from acting simultaneously as a government official and a consultant, business executive or NGO official. Still, outsourcing and the restructuring of governance in the US has opened up the field to boundary busters here too. Today, two-thirds of the people doing work for the US federal government aren’t on the government payroll. A diverse set of private organizations—companies, consulting firms, NGOs, think tanks and public-private partnerships—do more of the federal government’s work than civil servants. Private contractors write budgets, manage other contractors and implement policy, sometimes even making it through their interactions and overlapping roles in governance. And while contracts are on the rise given the demand for military, nation-building, foreign aid and homeland-security services under the current Bush administration, the number of civil servants available to oversee them is proportionately falling. Meanwhile, private contractors are often subject to more relaxed rules governing conflicts of interest than civil servants would be.
Neocon Network Part of the effectiveness of the Neocon core’s efforts, with some of its members in an administration that is “in power,” depends on having some of its members outside formal government. Further, the Neocon core has been successful in establishing duplicative governmental entities or positioning themselves within established ones. This often allows them to bypass the input of other bodies. Two units in the Pentagon, for instance, that dealt with policy and intelligence after 9/11—the Counterterrorism Evaluation Group and the Office of Special Plans—which were staffed in part from Neocon core-associated organizations did just that in the run-up to the Iraqi war. Neocon members from various foreign policy agencies in the government have also formed small circles of influence that have played a significant role in shaping the administration’s Middle East efforts. This Neocon core appealed early to the current Bush administration precisely because they bring coordination to sometimes convoluted government. Not only did the goals of this group for the Middle East and privatization coincide with Bush’s, but it also had a ready-made ideology for advancing them. The biggest problem with these sovereign cliques, however, is that they are ultimately unaccountable to the public and what are rapidly becoming the old rules. Those who do try to define or monitor their activities find it difficult given that the Neocons are deft at shifting between roles and rules, taking full advantage of our increasingly ambiguous world. Rather than curbing such activities derailing democracy, our government often extends opportunities to those who engage in them. Value of Network Analysis The value of a theoretical and methodological framework that can both dissect and connect the local and global and state and private is difficult to overstate in a multilayered and rapidly changing world. Today many in the world are perplexed by the ambiguous, shifting and overlapping of roles in policy and democratization processes. Analysis of relationships among actors, both individual and collective revealed by network analysis, enables an ethnographer to see different levels and arenas of activity in one frame of study and to observe in a snapshot how they are interwoven. Janine R Wedel is professor in the School of Public Policy at George Mason University and co-convenor of the AAA Interest Group for the Anthropology of Public Policy (IGAPP). She is currently writing a book tentatively titled The End of Loyalty: How Sovereign Cliques are Remaking the World. |
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