The government of infrastructure and social security

55 this context I develop two analyses of paperwork. In the Local Council, the voluntary council members used documents scantily and seldom kept minutes of sessions for long. One imaginary document, the budget of the Local Council, became a reified “boundary object” which served to spatially and temporally unite people’s diverse pursuits (Star and Griesemer 1989) (see Chapter Three). Conversely, the street level bureaucrats in the CSW spent half their work time administering files according to new NPM techniques, which most saw as wasted time that they could better use caring for the needy. Sometimes, however, these documents provided actuarial and evidentiary clues to social workers how a “welfare relation” changed over time, and how it could be changed in the future (see Chapter Five).

Governmental analyses, while sometimes highlighting violent sovereignty (Mbembe 2001), have more recently also turned towards materialism. Concretely, we have a growing body of investigations into the infrastructural, society enabling processes organised by the state (Collier 2011; Ferguson 2010; Harvey and Knox 2012). In a programmatic statement, governmental anthropologists argued that we should study how “contemporary changes in the forms of oikos [economy] and anthropos [human society]” are valued and what new political possibilities they entail (Collier and Ong 2003, 426). This research programme, reminiscent of Wolf’s anthropology of power, enabled analyses at “the intersection of governmental programs with the world they would transform” (Li 2007, 27). If government leads to the collusion between local state people and the working classes, it signifies less the “damaging effects of improvement programs” (Li 2007, 2) than the ‘moral re-appreciation’ of state policies (Thiemann 2014). In extreme cases, claims on government voiced by “everyday” people can even be couched as “care for the state” (Rajković 2015, 162–8). We thus begin to see how the strategic selectivity, relational modalities, and bureaucratic-governmental boundary work enable and condition one another in the processes of state formation.

In the final section I focus on (road) infrastructures and social security, the two governmental tasks that make up the subject matter of my empirical chapters. This is because, as I have argued in the Introduction, their production largely determined (but did not dominate) what Serbian citizens regarded as valuable state activity.

56 consolidate, enrich and become more oppressive and repressive. This state will not let

itself wither away or be overcome without resistance (Lefebvre 2009 [1978], 278–9).

In 1978, Henri Lefebvre tackled the relationship between the state and neoliberal globalization threatening lived spaces. In a process he called “becoming-world” or “worldness” (mondialité), Lefebvre projected the danger of an incipient, non-emancipatory “sweeping away” of the state.

His dystopian vision that the withering away of the state (desired by libertarians) might give rise to an “oligarchic-corporatist” amalgam of transnational fractions of capital, government, and the military, has been embraced by some (Kapferer 2005a; Kapferer and Bertelsen 2009).

But history and space being open (Lefebvre 1991; Massey 2012), there are other tendencies, too.⁶⁰ If the state was a materially condensed Relation incorporating social antagonisms, how were these dangers negotiated outside, within, and through local state relations? The production of road infrastructure presents one field where this question can be considered.

Anthropologies of the road

Max Gluckman’s article ‘The Bridge’ “inaugurated an ethnographic interest in this kind of space [the road] where diverse social and cultural groups move, meet and interact” (Dalakoglou and Harvey 2012, 461). In line with this (invented) tradition, anthropologists have studied road spaces in relation to time, (im)mobility and modernity (ibid). A relatively early intervention paid special attention to conflicting historical narratives concerning the building of rural roads in Galicia, Spain in the 1960s (Roseman 1996). While village interlocutors stressed that they had built “their road” through communal labour, a local power broker and the Municipal state staff remembered how it had been a top-down procedure, in which they had “taxed” the villagers by using their traditionally free labour. While both perspectives contradicted but also fed on each other, Roseman highlighted also the local appropriation of the village road building for purposes of revaluing communal solidarity 30 years later.

More violently than in rural Galicia, Niger’s ‘Road number 1’ had been built in the late 19^th century through colonial forced corvé labour that killed many workers and littered the landscape with destroyed magical spaces (Masquelier 2002). The destructive processes were re-lived by elder Nigerien travellers as the fear of ghosts haunting their journey. Masquelier concluded that

60 Small places negotiate large issues, as not only anthropologists argue: “The everyday protests; it revolts in the name of innumerable particular cases and unforeseen situations. Outside the zone affected by bureaucracy, or in its margins, the formless and the spontaneous subsist. Within the organized or over-organized sphere a stubborn resistance persists, so that form has to adapt, modify, and adjust” (Lefebvre 1961, 2:69; in Sheringham 2010, 149–50).

57 the colonial-capitalist infrastructure produced “non-places” (Augé 1995) “which are discursively mapped onto southern Niger’s highway [. They] would not exist without their connections to earlier material and mythical places“ (Masquelier 2002, 846). I take up from Roseman’s and Masquelier’s investigations a focus on the sedimented materiality of roads and their qualities to induce desire, affect, and claims. Incidentally, the first asphalt road in my rural field site was built like in the Galician case in the 1960s, and road construction has ever since been a highly charged and contested process (see Chapter Three).

Sedimenting meanings of roads are linked to generational belonging and imaginations, as Klaeger’s (2013) research implies. Doing fieldwork with the younger African generations that could not remember the horrors of colonial road building, Klaeger analysed their appropriation of the road as an everyday perceived and lived space of driving, walking and dwelling on (or next to) the roadside. Sitting under a shade, relaxing and fantasizing about the status of passers-by, Klaeger’s informants were people “travelling, while sitting” (Archambault 2012; cited in Klaeger 2013, 457).⁶¹ The men in my field site similarly spent much of their leisure time at the roadside shop, watching the world go by (see Chapter Four). More overtly political appropriations of the road were triggered by the recurrent dangers of speed. Road dwellers sometimes blocked the road to demonstrate their anger over lethal accidents, and ritual killings.

Thus, the road dwellers “transform[ed] the road into a space of and stage for power, protest and vigilante efforts” (Klaeger 2013, 464). In my field, similar political protests have been especially directed at local state representatives (see Chapter Three).

Geographically closer to my field site, Dalakoglou’s ethnographic and archival research on the road traversing the Albanian-Greek border area has distinguished between early socialist

“voluntaristic,” late socialist institutionalised, and capitalist intensified road production and use.

In the 1940s and 1950s, state organized road building involved the younger generation in “a de-alienating process through which people aspired to create a novel, socialist and modern future”

(Dalakoglou 2012, 573). Later, as socialist charisma turned routine, state building devolved into a “monolithic state-run project” that failed on “its basic materialistic conception, namely the creation of certain social relationships and human subjects” (ibid). Finally, capitalist roads with their promise of increased auto-mobility created new asymmetries, ‘speeding up’ the upwardly mobile and ‘braking’ the rest. As the post-socialist state dis-invested from infrastructure responsibilities, the rapid decay of the road’s asphalt was partly countered by increased foreign donor-investment. Similar differentiations in social, spatial and temporal mobility were also

61 Klaeger highlighted as further affective forms of road appropriation romances and parties unfolding on them.

58 painfully felt by my Serbian post-socialist interlocutors. Indeed, the local road building projects I studied had to make do with ever scarcer resources.⁶²

Two governmentalities (we might also call them relational modalities) operated in Peruvian road building, the “machinic” and the “emergent,” as Hannah Knox and Penny Harvey (2011) have argued. “Machinic governmentality” tried to minimize harm through a rigid codification of safety rules and regulations. “Emergent governmentality,” in contrast, was a bricolage that produced an adequate, but unstable engagement with the dangers of space-time compression.

The road builders who were engaged in the emergent governmentality felt the “enchantments of [modern] infrastructure” linked to promises “of speed, of political integration and of economic connectivity” (Harvey and Knox 2012, 524). Nuancing Scott’s (1998) narrative of grand governmental failure, the “enchantment of infrastructure” was a forceful promise which repeatedly failed on its own promises (see Li 2007). The “constant deferral [of modernity] […]

may end up diminishing people’s faith in the ability of governments and of experts to deliver suitable material forms, [… but] it strengthens the desire for them and constantly renews the sense that sometime soon they will appear and life will change for the better” (Harvey and Knox 2012, 534). A comparable cycle of dis-enchantment also took hold of Local Councillors and their critics, who were torn between the disappointments and cynicisms of post-socialist disinvestment, and their desire to outperform previous Local Councils in road building. Hence, emergent governmentality created intense struggles within, through and against the local state.

Similar cycles of enchantment, disenchantment, and re-enchantment would also grip the officials and citizens dealing with social security and social policy, to whom I finally turn.

Transformations of social security

In this thesis I follow a relational definition of ‘social security’ as the

efforts of individuals, groups of individuals and organizations to overcome insecurities related to their existence, that is, concerning food and water, shelter, care and physical and mental health, education and income, to the extent that the contingencies are not considered a purely individual responsibility […] (Benda-Beckmann and Benda-Beckmann 2000, 14).

Social security encompasses in this perspective the social organization of the satisfaction of material wants, needs (and desires) of the population in six non-hierarchical and interacting domains: cultural ideologies, normative institutions, individual perceptions, social relations, social practices, and social and economic consequences (ibid). I find this complex view of social

62 Major Serbian highways like koridor 10 and 11, however, have been built since 2009 using international credit lines (http://koridorisrbije.rs/lat), accessed 5.12.2015.

59 security useful to study the making, maintaining, negotiation, and breaking of local welfare relations, in the context of large scale welfare state transformations.

Although it is difficult to pinpoint trans-national trends, it has been broadly argued that a welfare state reorganisation has been underway since the 1970s in Western states, and after 1990 in post-socialist Eastern Europe. Bob Jessop, studying the transformations in Great Britain, tackled Offe’s paradox that “while capitalism cannot coexist with, neither can it exist without, the welfare state” (Jessop 2002, 275). In this context Jessop argues that

basic structural contradictions and strategic dilemmas in the capital relation […] ensure that the relationship between market, civil society and state is always problematic.

Capitalist growth depends essentially on the market-mediated exploitation of wage-labour – not on the inherent efficiency of unfettered markets […]. [I]f the state had failed to compensate for the failures of the market within the KWNS [Keynesian Welfare National State] and, in addition, generated its own failures, it does not follow that a return to the market will put things right. The SWPR [Schumpeterian Workfare Postnational Regime]

is the latest attempt to square this capital accumulation-social welfare (reproduction) circle (Jessop 2002, 276).

The contradictory relationship between state-regulated capitalism and the welfare state, tending to discipline the poor to work and to moralise their dependency in the SWPR, uncannily paralleled some of the logics that Foucault (1995) had unearthed in ‘Discipline and Punish’ for the early capitalist state. A similar relationship also characterised the recent changes in the Serbian welfare state, according to which social aid recipients deemed “able to work” were to work or undergo education in order not to forfeit state support (Mandić 2014). The Minister of Work and Social Protection remarked that the new regulations were “full of extraordinary left-wing ideas,” reminding us of the productionist bias in some strands of Marxist welfare theory:

Marx is of course famous for having proclaimed [… in the Critique of the Gotha Programme] a certain distributive ideal as the ultimate “from each according to his ability, to each according to his need.” […] [A] formula that Stalin would later famously render as

“From each according to his ability, to each according to his work” and Lenin even more succinctly as “He who does not work shall not eat” (Lenin 1968, 223), a phrase that eventually found its way into the constitution of the USSR (Ferguson 2015, 222 fn.10).

Of course, there have been powerful countertendencies to productionism within socialist thought that posited humanist solidarity as a central tenet. This was the case in late socialist Yugoslavia, as I will argue in Chapter Five. The recent confluence of productionism in Great Britain and Serbia therefore urges us to “think again about the conventional spatial and scalar fields across which policy is understood to move, perhaps towards a more ‘folded’

understanding of proximities and distances” (Clarke et al. 2015, 49).

For instance, analyses of the structural violence affecting the lives of the black poor in the USA have shown that not only social and economic policy change, but also the “war on drugs”

and the “penalization” of poverty influenced outcomes (Bourgois 2003; Duneier 2007;

60 Wacquant 2009). Akhil Gupta (2012, 24) recently borrowed the US terminology to analyse the Indian welfare bureaucracy and argued that “the ethics and politics of care […] is arbitrary in its consequences. […] [S]uch arbitrariness is not in itself arbitrary, rather, it is systematically produced by the very mechanisms that are meant to ameliorate social suffering.” Gupta seems to blame here the bureaucracy for the dismal developmental outcomes of India. Franz von Benda-Beckmann enlisted the limitations of such an approach, i.e. of treating social security outside the context of multiple exploitations and distributive exclusions. Dissecting the skewed attempts at introducing state social security in Indonesia, he argued:

(T)hese policies, intended or unintended, contribute to redistribution from the less well off to the better off. A reverse distributive policy, not spellbound by formal employment, optimalization of production and social security attached to this, is called for […]. Only then can social security policy stop being the ‘cleaning lady for the debris left by economic development’ (Benda-Beckmann 1994, 114).

In the same vein, James Ferguson (2015, 199) has called for a ‘new left art of government,’ “a form of politics that would combine the recognition that distribution is central (and not simply a derivative or a reflex of systems of production) with an appreciation of the political sociology that would be necessary to bring it about (within which the bureaucratic state remains a sine qua non).” Ferguson’s call is based on his analysis of contemporary Southern Africa, in which he showed that large swathes of the population, regarded as valuable and scarce in earlier economic formations, have become redundant to the reproduction of neo-capitalism. Whereas in the 20^th century their relations of dependence on industrial labour had assured a kind of

“unequal incorporation” through “work membership,” their recent “precarious position”

increased their economic as well as social and moral dispossession (Ferguson 2013, 231, 235).

How societies could weave new “dependency” relations as “work membership” receded is a question that has been haunting former Yugoslavia, where moral anxieties arising from rapid deindustrialisation abound. For instance, much ambivalence surrounds the gradations of incorporation/ex-corporation of “redundant” workers in retraining programmes in the Serbian city of Kragujevac, as one anthropological study has recently shown (Rajković 2015).

Aggravating the effects of deindustrialisation, the former Yugoslav central states, unlike their South African counterparts, have translated IMF and World Bank policy advice rather less

‘progressively’ since the 1980s (Stambolieva and Dehnert 2011, 49, 101, 141, 229, 268, 324).

As they introduced aspects of the Schumpeterian Workfare Postnational Regime, naturalized images of benign kinship regained currency. These images of the “good family” came soon into conflict with rising domestic scarcity and social inequalities. These discursive transformations could sometimes have surprising effects. In a recent article Tatjana Thelen, Duška Roth and I

61 have argued that the naturalization of “good” kinship was used by Serbian social workers to innovate state provided old age care by modelling it on images of family care (Thelen, Thiemann & Roth 2014). In Chapter Six I take up and develop the argument further.

Using ‘care’ as a sensitizing practice concept that cuts across social and ideological boundaries, Tatjana Thelen (2014) found post-socialist ‘hidden’ caring relationships in eastern Germany that western German contemporaries typically did not expect or evaluated as undesirable. In other words, a post-socialist “ethics of care” (Tronto 2011) still partly informed non-state as well as state-organized care relations. According to research conducted by another anthropologist of eastern Germany, local welfare managers shared a rather socialist focus on care among work colleagues, regardless whether they positioned themselves pro or contra state socialism (McGill 2013). Similarly – but with a maybe infelicitous terminology – Marek Mikuš has termed (post-)socialist Serbian associations for the handicapped “traditional forms of civil society,” because they continued to ask for a “paternalist welfare relationship,” in comparison to Western-inspired disability NGOs that pressed for autonomizing and individualizing reforms (Mikuš 2013, 167–94).

As these interventions suggest, state care and social security can depend on diverse relational modalities of mobilising resources. Čarna Brković, who studied the welfare state in a Bosnian Centre for Social Work (CSW), has found in this respect that social policy was so inadequately financed that social workers, in order to provide resources to the needy, developed gifting qualities and accumulated indebted (ingratiated) relations. One social worker enhanced her political savvy so much that way that she became a “big woman” (Brković 2012, 199–212).

Nonetheless, many pressing social concerns could not be managed by the welfare state alone.

Thus, the parents of children with serious diseases had to initiate ‘humanitarian actions’ to collect funds for treatment abroad. Not all parents succeeded to navigate the multiple social relations, and even the effective ones criticized the emerging, uncanny “move-opticon” of public moral self-representation (Brković 2014).

Like Brković I studied an underfunded – and in my case over-reformed – CSW. Ferguson’s valuable provocation of framing socio-economic relations as ‘dependencies’ has sharpened our sensibilities for the importance of emerging welfare state arrangements. For the inter-dependencies across the internal boundary between state and society which I have observed, I propose to use the similarly provocative term “local state relations.”

62 Conclusion

The elliptical view of the local state as a Relation owes much to Nicos Poulantzas’ (highly scaled) argument about capitalist nation states. In this chapter I combined the political-sociological theory he inspired with three strands of the anthropology of the state – the Manchester School’s qualitative network analysis of local state actors, ideology-critical research on the modalities of power, and analyses of the materiality of bureaucracy and government. In the process I developed four axes for a relational approach to the local state, namely (1) embeddedness, (2) strategic selectivity, (3) relational modalities, and (4) boundary work.

What is the combined perspective on the local state that emerges? I have argued that the local state mediates concrete, complex, and contradictory processes – influenced by diverse strategic projects of ordering society that are enacted or challenged in everyday situations by local state actors who negotiate diverse relational modalities within their respective social relations.

Under conditions of present-day neo-capitalism, local states have experienced a strong, transnational political project pushing away from the inclusive organization of infrastructures, work-based social insurances, and welfare payments (the Keynesian Welfare National State) to a more restrictive, market oriented, and punishing approach (the Schumpeterian Workfare Post-national Regime). Yet, as Manchester anthropologists have consistently argued, we need to integrate the agency of people in the interface with structures to develop an adequate theory of state processes (Long 2001: 27, 28). In fact, people resist, appropriate, navigate and re-channel strategically selective images and practices within their social relations. Against the background of broader socialist governmental ambitions concerning the enabling of human relations, post-socialist government negotiates the changing relevance of cultural, material and social practices of the state. The negotiated state practices that I analyse throughout the thesis are desires for socially relevant paperwork, meaningful road building, (socialist) humanist professionalism, caring relations with users, and a reclaiming of government from below. In the process, local state actors experiment with various forms of politics, some of which are conservative, others possible inspirations for a new left art of government.

The production of infrastructures and social security, my two focal points for studying the trans-formations of the local state, have been longstanding subjects of social anthropology, concerns of local government, and interests of the population. In the first empirical chapter I study the ascent of a rising local politician from the vantage point of his ‘embeddedness’ in rural and urban infrastructural and social security relevant relations.

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