The Expat Experts
By Sam Vaknin
Author of "Malignant Self Love - Narcissism Revisited"
In "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland", Lewis Carroll wrote: "Curtsy while you're thinking of something to say. It saves time."
What a missed career. He should have been an expat expert. To
paraphrase a sentence originally written about women (no misogynism
implied): "What else is a foreign consultant but a foe to
friendship, an inescapable punishment, a necessary evil, a natural
temptation, a desirable calamity, a domestic danger, a delectable
detriment, an evil nature, painted with fair colours?" (Anne Baring
and Jules Cashford, They Myth of the Goddess: Evolution of an Image
(London: Penguin Books Inc., 1993).
Not unlike poor Mr. Prufrock in T.S. Eliot's "The Love Song of J.
Alfred Prufrock," foreign advisors in the exotic countries of CEE,
especially once moderately inebriated, are prone to dramatic
monologues and musings, "measuring out their lives in coffee spoons"
as they contemplate "the yellow smoke that slides along the street,
rubbing its back upon the window-panes."
All foreign advisors belong to either of three categories: the
hustlers, the bureaucrats and the corporates.
The first sub-species peddle their specious wares aggressively,
flamboyantly and relentlessly. They present a picturesque assortment
of quaint British eccentricities and pronounced professional
idiosyncrasies. They often are under a cloud - but never in the
shade. Sometimes they even flaunt their chequered past and colourful
adventures. It is the only form of entertainment in the drab
cemetery that Eastern and Southeastern Europe is. In the hope of
landing a fat consultancy contract with a confused minister or with
a terror-stricken central banker, with a quadriplegic stock exchange
or with a dying industry lobby, with sansculotte trade unions or
with gullible Western NGOs - they gypsy around, living off tattered
suitcases in shabby hotels, yearning to strike gold in the next
station of their mendicant's journey. Necessarily abstemious - they
are otherwise and when serendipity strikes, containers of greed and
avarice and gluttony and hedonism. Unfulfilled, they often
deteriorate to colluding in obscure dealings with corrupt officials.
You can find these hangers-on in every pub and bar from the farthest
Russian north to the warm waters of Bulgaria, the same dogged look,
the same mane of yellowing hair, the old-cut suits and sole-worn
shoes and the drooling eagerness to gossip and to profit.
Contrast these has beens to the bureaucratic breed. Ever the
laptopped, they travel first class and reside in five star luxurious
hotels strewn among the decrepitude of their surrounding. Unashamed,
they flaunt shimmering utility vehicles and satellite cellular
phones in the face of the unemployed and downtrodden they came
ostensibly to help. Occupied mainly by scanning the daily paper and
solving simple crossword puzzles, they disrupt their onerous routine
only to wine and dine venal officials on mutually fattening expense
accounts. They are the malignancy of Bretton Woods, a cancerous
growth of well intended aid, the hideous face of altruism. Their
organizations are the dumping grounds of the inept and the unwanted,
the professional failures and the embarrassingly corrupt, the
egregiously ignorant and the narcissistically immature. They tax the
resources of their hosts as all parasites do and give very little in
return. Their advice is often wrong and almost invariably leads to
adversity and woe. They tend to overstep their mandate and supplant
elected offices and their humiliated occupants. They dictate and
intervene and threaten and determine with the callousness of those
who lose no thing when their "advice" goes awry. In time, they move
on from one political carcass to another, birds of prey with metal
wings and the sated satisfaction of the well fed and the multi- salaried. Earning in a day what others earn in two months - they
often hold their mission and its objects in contempt and scorn. They
are content to climb the autistic ladder that is a multilateral
institution. The rare are recruited by the private sector as third
rate lobbyists.
The suborned politicians of this region have good use for these
emissaries of defective micromanagement. They hide their thefts and
their incompetence behind a fig leaf of "they told me to". They
blame their failures, their patently erroneous decisions, their
marked inabilities - on the negative externalities of the
international community. An elaborate sign language of winks and
nods develops in the execrable, fungal intimacy between native
bureaucracy and foreign supervisors. The "advisors" and "country
managers" and "resident officers" often come themselves from shrines
of good governance and civil society, the likes of China and India
and Saudi Arabia or worse. They understand the secret language of
power and quid pro quo. What better than a fat and satiated cat to
guard the skinny and famished ones? So, they collaborate in the most
lamentable of manners, eyes closed, ears plugged, mouth stapled. The
bureaucrats author delusional science fiction, delirious potpourris
of wishful thinking and grotesque projections, the customary
backslapping and mutual admiration. And the politicians pretend to
listen, patiently ignoring the more arcane lingo and outlandish
offers, waiting for the aliens to take off to their planet and allow
them to proceed with plundering and loot.
The third type of expert foreigners are members of academe or
business corporations (the distinction quite blurred in the United
States). The infamous Harvard affair in Russia exposed the profit
motives of these self appointed and self-proclaimed do gooders. It
also elucidated their moral standard - rather the lack thereof.
Scores of Western consultancies set shop in CEE and southeast
Europe - accountancies, law firms, the odd professional. Western
know how on anything from wood processing to canning, from
intellectual property to real estate and from publishing to brewing
can be obtained. Ultimately, this breed of entrepreneur-consultants
represents the biggest hope. True, profit motivated and all too
willing to cross the lines for client, God and country - still,
their thinking is a sound one, their ethos genuine, their goals are
realistic and they seem to know the path. In their ruthless
application of the admixture of drive and dream, they often lead the
way - obtaining finance, converting others to the cause,
constructing projects, educating, preaching and teaching and
hectoring and, in this arduous, often derided process, falling in
love with land and people.
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AUTHOR BIO (must be included with the article)
Sam Vaknin ( http://samvak.tripod.com ) is the author of Malignant
Self Love - Narcissism Revisited and After the Rain - How the West
Lost the East. He served as a columnist for Global Politician,
Central Europe Review, PopMatters, Bellaonline, and eBookWeb, a
United Press International (UPI) Senior Business Correspondent, and
the editor of mental health and Central East Europe categories in
The Open Directory and Suite101.
Until recently, he served as the Economic Advisor to the Government
of Macedonia.
Visit Sam's Web site at http://samvak.tripod.com
