Who voted for you, Mario Monti?

The technocrats have taken charge in Italy and Greece but it’s not the first time they have supplanted elected politicians – often with unhappy results.

By Michael Burleigh

As a young man, the utopian socialist Claude Henri de Rouvroy, comte de Saint-Simon (1760-1825) insisted that his valet wake him each morning with the exhortation: “Remember, monsieur le comte, that you have great things to do.”

Saint-Simon was the first systematic advocate of rule by industrialists who made things and scientists who knew things. He was an apostle of “technocracy”, that is the belief that we would all be better off if only experts were allowed to rule. “The role of the talkers is approaching its end, that of the doers will not be long delayed in making its appearance,” he warned the 30,000 clerics and rentiers he thought France could do without.

Technocracy has suddenly become all the rage amidst the debt crisis of the eurozone. In Greece, prime minister George Papandreou was ousted in favour of the unelected former central banker Lucas Papademos, after he had the effrontery to call the referendum that never was. In Italy, Mario Monti, the unelected former EU commissioner, has anointed a cabinet of academics, bankers and an admiral, without a single representative of Italy’s political parties. This novel step is designed to reassure international bond markets, which have recently pushed Italy’s yields to perilous levels.

Leaving aside the notorious petty-mindedness and hopeless indecision that characterises any academic meeting I’ve ever attended, the example of the Soviet Union, 89 per cent of whose politburo consisted of graduate engineers, should give us pause for thought.

Other governments and regimes have experimented with technocracy. In the 1920s, Republican and Democrat US governments dispatched Wall Street’s finest, the banker Charles Dawes and industrialist Owen Young, to resolve the war debts and reparations crises that twice reduced Weimar Germany to an economic basket case.

In the late 1950s, Francisco Franco appointed several “number ones” – people who had done brilliantly at university, coincidentally with an Opus Dei background – to liberalise the Spanish economy and reintegrate it with western Europe.

During the Cold War, US foreign policy was dominated by a group of mainly East Coast “wise men”, many of them wealthy industrialists or corporate lawyers such as Averell Harriman or John Foster Dulles. The elitist nature of this group was made very clear when one of the greatest Secretaries of State, the anglophile snob Dean Acheson, said: “If you truly had a democracy and did what people wanted, you’d go wrong every time.”

The Kennedy administration was the high point of technocrats colonising government by invitation. Bright, “can-do”, forty-something whizz kids were recruited from academia and industry – the supreme example being Robert McNamara, the president of Ford Motor Corporation in Detroit. The fact that he had been co-responsible for one of the largest disasters in Ford’s history – the Edsel car, which lost $400 million and is still a synonym for commercial failure – was ignored.

Nothing was fully comprehensible to “Mac” unless expressed in mathematical terms. In this spirit, as secretary of defence, he set about modernising South Vietnam in order to win a war he construed in terms of bomb tonnages dropped and body counts achieved. Contrary information simply did not compute as he set about installing electricity and a fridge in every peasant hut, unmindful of the fact that the Vietcong took over the village at night.

In our times, this technocratic turn has been evident in the under-developed world. In societies like Benin or Malawi, where elected politicians cannot be presumed to understand macro economics, technocrats have been appointed to government to ensure that international aid continues to flow. They can talk the talk of austerity, liberalisation, privatisation, rather than crudely asking: “when do we get the money?”

In Europe, we are now witnessing the displacement of elected politicians by men and women who, as their careers reveal, are au fait with the jargon of the European Union, although they too will be wondering “when do we get the money?”

Since this development seems to be popular in Italy, it must reflect a massive loss of confidence in an existing political class, collectively characterised by one Italian politician as “dwarfs and ballerinas”, terms not quite imaginative enough to encompass the doings of Silvio Berlusconi.

The failure of European leadership has certainly struck the Americans and Chinese, too. The institutional alphabet soup of the eurozone visibly bewildered President Obama. He has since said: “The problem right now is a problem of political will. It is not a technical problem.” President Hu Jintao shook his head and refused to move hard-earned Chinese savings into the Ponzi scheme that was the European Financial Stability Facility so as to underwrite retrospectively the spending spree that preceded the sovereign debt crisis.

A generation of political pygmies seem overwhelmed by the crisis their own policies have brought upon them: from deregulated banks that should be relicensed as clubs in Las Vegas, to a single currency that ignored the very different economic circumstances, and cultures, of its 17 members.

In many countries, discontent with the political class has been brewing for a long time, whether the “enarch” elite from the grandes écoles that administers France, the Mafiosi who preside over Italy, or the bumptious lawyers and trade union hacks who are so generously represented in our own legislature.

In Britain, too, what is touted as a fresh generational shift consists in government by callow personalities with no hinterland outside their own school cliques, political parties, and think tanks. Yet we should be careful in wishing the reign of technocrats upon ourselves.

The bankers are burdened by the fact that they caused the financial crash in the first place and are inherently unlikely to countenance anything too troubling to the interests of their former colleagues. Questions are already being asked about their relationships with Goldman Sachs and other architects of Lehman’s crash. Men like Monti, who is steeped in EU lore, are not going to suddenly disinvest in a utopian project they have devoted their lives to. They are part of the same arrogant and remote Euro elite that botched together the project to start with.

The technocratic train is also likely to hit the buffers sooner than they may imagine. The people are still represented by politicians in national parliaments, even if such unelected bodies as the EU Commission or the European Court of “Human Rights” have massively subverted their powers.

These politicians represent local communities, or at least networks of needy political clients if we are talking about southern Europe. When the technocrats decide to retire tens of thousands of public sector workers, they will run into the brick wall of politicians who owe their election to such interests.

In this country, whatever one thinks of the political class, which is not much, it contains men and women who have little or no function unless it is to demonstrate some meaningful connection between rulers and ruled. For if it is the case that politicians have no power vis a vis unelected international bureaucrats and technocrats, then we might as well acquire some who do. The logical question to ask is: if politicians do not trust their own people – see Merkel and Sarkozy in the case of the Greeks – then why should people trust politicians? That is where rule by technocrats takes us, and it is not a good place to be.

And we should remember Saint-Simon, in the pitiful penury of his last years. He eventually shot himself repeatedly, and survived, asking his doctor: “Explain this… my dear Salandière, a man with seven bullets in his head can live and think.” Sympathetic French bankers maintained his grave in Père Lachaise and the Soviet Union put up a memorial to him. Sic transit gloria mundi, as the fleeting technocrats of today should be getting their valets to remind them each morning.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/8896719/Who-voted-for-you-Mario-Monti.html