Janine Wedel - Shadow Elite - How the World's New Power Brokers Undermine Democracy, Government, and the Free Market

Over the past dozen or so years, my attempt to understand and explain the world of players who exhibit flexian behavior has led me to seek out others whose experiences and perspectives can shed light on this phenomenon. One of my many interlocutors has been the irrepressible Jack Blum. A lawyer and longtime observer of U.S. government agencies, he is an expert on money laundering as well as an investigator into Iran-Contra and other lesser-known affairs. In trying to capture the essence of the new breed, he told me one day: “If you’re in the academic world, or you’re a legal-type focused investigator, you want everything to fit into neat boxes, and none of this stuff fits into neat boxes. It’s these multiple roles that these people have. None of these people are neat.” 28

CHAPTER TWO

When Privatization Meets Truthiness

THE NEW SYSTEM USHERED IN BY THE INTERACTION OF THE FOUR transformational developments of the late-twentieth and early-twenty-first centuries has brought new ways of being in the world. A broad array of “nonstate” actors—from associates of companies, quasi-government organizations, and nongovernmental organizations to flexians and flex nets—puts these new ways to use every day. Flexibility is undeniably one of them. As a high-powered program director at a high-powered think tank expressed it: “I tend to operate in a ‘just in time’ mode, sort of like Toyota, because I realize that busy, important people tend not to plan ahead much. They tend to pivot this way and that in a high-flex mode given constantly changing priorities.” A look at two individuals who possess the skills needed to maneuver the new environment, without rising to the level of being flexians, tells us much about the wide range of actors who both make and mirror it. Their rich stories, multifaceted lives, and international networks illuminate the texture of this environment. 1

Ešref-Kenan Rašidagić, thirty-five years old when I met him in 2006, is not a flexian, but illustrates the qualities possessed by the many operators who nimbly manage the new environment. After serving in the Bosnian army in the early 1990s, he made his way to Malaysia, one of the few countries then accepting Bosnians without a visa. There, he earned a degree in political science from the International Islamic University [of] Malaysia. Then, through the Internet, he found out about the American University of Beirut, applied, and earned a master’s degree in Middle Eastern studies.

When relative peace returned to his homeland, so did Rašidagić. Settling in Sarajevo, he married and supported himself as a freelance translator of English for various international organizations. He sought opportunities to insert himself into activities that mattered. In 2001, Rašidagić met Paul Stubbs, a British sociologist based in Croatia. Rašidagić was on a short-term assignment as a translator for a project to reform the nation’s social sector; Stubbs had been hired to evaluate the project, sponsored by the Independent Bureau for Humanitarian Issues, a local offshoot of an international NGO funded by the Finnish government. Rašidagić impressed Stubbs, who saw his suitability for the post of project manager, a position he has held ever since. As Rašidagić became more established, he performed overlapping combinations of contract work for organizations ranging from UNICEF to the Danish Ministry of Foreign Affairs to locally registered NGOs. At the same time, he contributed input to his country’s Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper (sponsored by the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank), which later was adopted as the Development Strategy of Bosnia-Herzegovina. He accepted a full-time university position and did all these jobs simultaneously. Today he works full time for both an NGO and the University of Sarajevo, where he teaches international relations and comparative political systems. 2

Rašidagić has few counterparts among his countrymen. He exemplifies a genus of engaged citizens who assert themselves through consulting by maneuvering through a welter of international, state, and nongovernmental organizations. Consulting is a means—in some settings, virtually the only means—of positive engagement in helping to build one’s nation or civic project.

Consultants like Rašidagić, of course, can play an exponentially greater role in and across fledgling states and unsettled arenas than they could elsewhere. But many of the qualities that today are sought and rewarded in such a context also appear to be sought and rewarded more widely.

A look at the experience of a young American consultant operating in the United States and internationally, who also exhibits flex qualities but does not rise to the level of flexian-hood, is equally telling. In 2000, college graduate Greg Callman, a twenty-nine-year-old when I met him in 2005, found his way to Amsterdam, where he landed a job as a research assistant for an American professor at the University of Amsterdam. In that post, he tracked worldwide “civil society” responses to the World Trade Organization on the Internet and developed a system called an “issue tracker.” Callman also began supporting research for the professor’s wife’s employer, the Open Society Institute (OSI) in Budapest. The OSI is part of the network of organizations founded in the aftermath of the Cold War by the Hungarian-American philanthropist and financier George Soros to encourage democracy, civil society, and human rights. Callman also worked for an eight-person Dutch media company after meeting one of its principals, who spoke at Callman’s university. At the same time, he started his own sole proprietorship, through which he hired himself out to employers, and learned to write a business plan and manage a company. While doing all this, Callman earned a master’s degree in social and political science from the University of Amsterdam. 3

The career paths traveled by Rašidagić and Callman are quite different from that of a perennial consultant, say, for one of the “Big Four” (not long ago “Big Eight”) accounting firms. For these two (and others like them), “becoming” is a continual life process in which developmental stages are replaced by fluidity as they pursue an uneven mix of business and NGO start-ups and contract work, educational pursuit, and activism. Their paths reflect a much larger pattern: the fact that, more and more, people (not only the younger generation) are building their lives and careers across multiple sectors, institutions, and countries. As Paul Stubbs has noted, our multilayered, rapidly changing world rewards adaptability. Those who are flexible tend to be young and unburdened by either wide knowledge or wisdom, while those with valuable expertise are often older but may be inflexible. “The real challenge is to get both,” he said. 4

Ana Devic, a Yugoslavian-born lecturer and consultant who teaches in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at the University of Glasgow, is a rare individual who possesses both expertise and flexibility. Lamenting the lower value that consultancy places on knowledge, as opposed to flexibility, she noted: “Every morning [in consulting] we are [starting] from scratch.” Her quip insightfully characterizes not only the adaptability required in consultancy, but also the ahistorical, context-free nature of the endeavor, which coexists comfortably with temporary affiliation. 5

Rather than the West leading the rest, this time states and arenas on the move seem to have something to say to more established or staid environments. While the former show us the qualities encouraged by the new system at their starkest, parallel (and sometimes connected) processes are also very much at work in the latter.