Coda: Snared in Bureaucracy

Nadir Dendoune is accustomed to adventure. Carrying triple nationality—French, Algerian, and Australian—in 1993, just shy of his 21st birthday, he embarked on a round-the-world trip on a bicycle for the Australian Red Cross that followed a 3,000 mile bike-tour of Australia. Ten years later, at the height of the war in Iraq, he pitched up in Baghdad, offering himself as a human shield. Five years after that, he decided it would be a challenge to be the first Algerian to summit Mt. Everest. So he climbed it. But earlier this year, he met his greatest challenge of all—Middle East bureaucracy.In January, he returned to Baghdad, this time on assignment for the great French monthly Le Monde Diplomatique to chronicle the 10th anniversary of the start of the Iraq War. Arriving with a journalist visa, he happened to snap a photo of a water treatment facility in Dora, south of the capital, and was promptly arrested. Taken to the feared central prison in Baghdad, he was held for 23 days without any charges brought against him. Le Monde launched a global campaign for his release, including a petition signed by many of France’s leading luminaries and published in four of Paris’s major dailies. Finally, even after he was released on bail, it took 12 more days for courts to clear him of these bogus and clearly politically inspired charges. On March 1, he was accompanied to the airport by the French ambassador and an Australian diplomat. Minutes before boarding, however, he was seized again. His visa had expired. It took four more days to sort that out—as though the Iraqi authorities didn’t have anything better to do.The fact is, Dendoune was a victim of bureaucracy, plain and simple. And throughout the world—the developed as well as the developing world—millions, rich and poor alike, are snagged each day by the snares of what is perhaps the single most debilitating manifestation of government. In my previous Coda, I promised to devote this space this year to examining a broad spectrum of different aspects of government—how effectively they function in working for the people they profess to serve. I began with the judiciary. But as important as that function is in protecting the safety and freedom of nations, penetrating our lives even to the most basic levels, none affects more people more directly, more immediately, or more insidiously than bureaucracies.Above all, bureaucracies should not blow with inevitably shifting political winds at the top. Such a practice appears to be at the root of the problems represented by Obama and the left-wing agenda of the IRS. But such practices are hardly unique to Washington. They become problems wherever political hubris might rear its head—in François Hollande’s socialist administration in Paris and its pursuit of his right-wing predecessor or the Italian judiciary’s pursuit of Silvio Berlusconi, not to mention the dogs of war that Putin has repeatedly unleashed on his political rivals or indeed any Russian he wanted to bring to heel.How bureaucracies function and how their operations might be improved is a vital question that is almost never addressed. Reforming bureaucracies, or even tweaking them around the edges, is effectively a third rail of politics that has brought many promising careers to a crushing end.Unlike virtually any other aspect of government, bureaucracies are themselves most curious—their traits, their very design affecting their efficiency, responsiveness, and impact. It would be best to examine their traits and their impact before we suggest how they might be brought to heel, or at least curb their most flagrant abuses.Historically, bureaucracies date as far back as the time humans first organized themselves into communities. Someone needed to care for the livestock, see to the collection of taxes or common charges, attend to the security, and eventually maintain the common areas and thoroughfares. Bureaucracies were a feature of the earliest city-states of Mesopotamia 5,000 years before Christ and the earliest Chinese civilizations of the Qin dynasty. Of course by the time of the Greek and Roman empires, bureaucracies were well developed. In France, under King Louis XIII, Cardinals Richelieu and Mazarin were responsible for the modern structure of their nation’s bureaucracy. Taxation was, of course, the principal motivation for its growth and expansion. Monarchs of Europe and Asia alike needed a means of financing their lavish lifestyles, not to mention the military machines that would cement them in power and allow them to expand.So today, the accumulation of wealth for dictators and democrats alike is central to the mission of bureaucrats as the prime lubricant of the machinery of government. It’s no secret that the top members of each graduating class at France’s single most elite institution of higher education—the École Nationale d’Administration (ÉNA)—are given the exalted rank of inspecteur de finance, launching them into a career at the very pinnacle of French bureaucracy.Virtually every aspect of life is within the powers of bureaucracy to regulate as well. It was Cardinal Richelieu who, in 1634, created the Académie Française to police the French language. Through the centuries, the Académie has ensured that a certain linguistic purity remain unchallenged, even as other languages were constantly evolving. Since its founding, the Académie has published eight complete dictionaries of French and has been working on the ninth since the eighth was completed in 1935. The first volume (A to Enzyme) was published in 1992. Then work accelerated, the second volume (Éocène to Mappemonde) appeared in 2000. Often, the 40 members of the Academy, known as les Immortels will spend an entire session debating the etymology of a single word. One of its primary missions in preserving the purity of the language is to prevent creeping anglicization. Walkman, software, and email are verboten in favor of baladeur, logiciel, and courriel. Try telling that to a hip young Francophile, of course. In 1997, Lionel Jospin, the Socialist prime minister, began using the feminine locution La Ministre to refer to a female minister of the government (since francophone Canada, Belgium, and Switzerland had already adopted that practice). Forget about it, pronounced the Académie Française. French ministers of either sex will continue to be known as Le Ministre.In the Académie, each member is deemed “immortal.” His (or more rarely her) seat is filled by a vote of the members when its possessor dies. Which brings us to the first principal, and most malevolent characteristic, of a bureaucracy. It is largely self-perpetuating.Self-perpetuating, of course, means choosing folks who look very much like yourself. So the first woman, Marguerite Yourcenar, was not elected an Immortelle until 1980. And the first non-French woman, the brilliant Algerian novelist Assia Djebar, whose mother tongue is Arabic, did not join the ranks of the Immortals until 2005. When I asked her several years later, she still couldn’t say why she was ever selected in the first place.Most bureaucracies function in this self-perpetuating mode by their method of selecting their membership. Often, this devolves to a special examination that is conceived by those sitting in the very positions to be filled and designed to select individuals who will not only be virtually identical to themselves but will also not prove in any fashion a challenge to their bureaucratic way of life. The foreign service exam in the United States and many other nations is a classic example in that respect. Taken in two stages—written and oral—the foreign service exam is designed to uncover individuals with the ability and temperament of a postal clerk who are nevertheless prepared to spend years in remote and often unpalatable reaches of the world processing visa requests and issuing passports to expats of their own nationality. Both are relatively mindless endeavors whose carefully circumscribed parameters are designed to discover those individuals most likely to overstay their visas and become illegal immigrants. A carefully designed computer program could probably be equally efficient, but would result in the termination of a vast army of individuals who, together with their supervisors, are guaranteed a lifetime of adequate pay and benefits and a comfortable retirement at a relatively young age.The result is the identification of individuals all but devoid of imagination or initiative. There was, for instance, my recruitment into the Central Intelligence Agency. Forty-eight years ago, in my senior year in college, and at the height of James Bond fever, I was attracted by the notice in Harvard’s Office of Career Planning of a visit from a CIA recruiter. So I signed up, and eventually was dispatched down to headquarters in Langley, Virginia for a series of interviews, polygraphs, and other assorted indignities. I was up for a job in the relatively young bureau that produced the President’s Daily Brief—a daily newspaper of top-secret information prepared for a very limited audience each morning, namely the president, vice president, and several other top national security officials. At the end of my recruiting day, my handler, a nameless bureaucrat, ordered me to proceed for my final interview to Building No. 213 in the Navy Yard. I was instructed to change taxis in the middle of Washington to foil any potential pursuers and preserve the top-secret nature of the facility. I performed my errand impeccably, or so I thought, changing taxis at the Capital Hilton. But when I told the driver of the second cab my final destination, he turned, grinned brightly at me and replied, “Oh, you mean the CIA building.” When it was first built, there was a big controversy about it, which played out in the pages of the Washington Post, but agency bureaucrats had continued to preserve the fiction of its highly classified nature.Beyond self-perpetuation, most bureaucracies also stifle growth, innovation, and imagination. For all of their value in delivering a society of order out of chaos, they neutralize that value by how they perform their functions—mindlessly, thoughtlessly, with an agenda often deeply at odds with any national priorities of the nations and the people who pay them to perform their functions.At the time of the rule of Indira Gandhi in India, there was a determined effort to encourage, at all cost, the concept of “buy India.” If there was any product manufactured or developed within India, then its foreign homologue, no matter how much more efficient, rapid, modern, or inexpensive, would be barred from entry into the local market. The New York Times itself became ensnared in this web of bureaucratic blunders. Sometime in the mid-1970s, nearly a decade into her rule and with many of her more bizarre policies deeply entrenched in a bureaucracy that existed largely to carry them out, The Times had converted its New York newsroom from typewriters to the new electronic word processors. Eventually, similar terminals were shipped to the important foreign bureaus, which were instructed to install them and begin to generate output that would therefore be compatible with similar terminals in New York where the paper was edited. The Times’s Delhi bureau chief was told that such a terminal had been shipped to him and to look out for it. Some weeks went by, and no terminal, so the bureau went looking. Sure enough it turned out to have been impounded in a customs facility at Delhi airport since a “comparable” Indian product existed. “Why not come and a have a look at it,” suggested an eager Indian bureaucrat. So the bureau chief and his assistant showed up at the plant producing these devices. There, all but filling an immense room, was a colossus—a vacuum-tube-based Indian “computer,” lights blinking away, an operator seated at the keyboard. “See, an Indian word processor that does everything your machine does,” the bureaucrat smiled brightly. “But where would we put it?” the Timesman inquired, after overcoming his speechlessness. “It’s bigger than our entire news bureau.”Eventually, of course, such restrictions were lifted. India assumed its rightful place as a leader of the developing world. But deeply entrenched residues of this bureaucratic state remain. Most importantly, however, such mindless idiocies, whether in developing or developed nations, stifle growth and initiative—indeed eradicate it wherever it threatens to rear its head. Expunging such mindless, self-serving actions, and removing their every manifestation should at once encourage free trade, development, and innovation. So when bilateral and eventually global free-trade pacts developed, their first goals, beyond simply reducing tariffs, were to reduce so-called “non-tariff barriers,” of the type that kept our Times computer locked up for months in a customs house in Delhi. Of course, hardly surprisingly, these same free trade pacts spawned their own acute, mindless bureaucracies with their own idiosyncrasies and self-perpetuating band of international civil servants.Bureaucracies, and especially bureaucrats, serve themselves all too often and far more directly than those they are supposed to regulate. 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