Penners Michael Maclay gave a paper at a conference organised by the European Thematic Network in Political Science in Leiden, July 1999. His paper can still be accessed (http://www.epsnet.org/news/eurolei.htm). In it he describes his own career up to that point (sketchily of course), the work that his present company does (sketchily again, but read between the lines), and how academic political scientists can break into this sort of work. Another depressing tale of whoring, in other words. Maclay begins by charting the decline of the study of politics: "There is some room for education on technical and financial questions, but politics increasingly is seen by these masters of the universe as being in the same part of the library as Latin and history. In the oldish days, and I am only going back about ten years, political science could be some sort of a fast ticket to the nomenklatura. This was the case in France, to some extent in Germany, in America, perhaps less in Britain than elsewhere. I would say that the task now in the language of the new elites is to master the networks and to access the niches. It doesn't work by the old nomenklatura route any more." He then continues by looking at the strengths of political science as a discipline: "For us outsiders, there are strengths as well as weaknesses in the way political science seems to work as a discipline. You are good at exploring fundamentals, in creating and interpreting the context of institutions and events, and there is a greater need for that, I would submit, than ever. This is a period of dizzy institutional innovation, both in the private sector and in the public sector. The ability of political scientists to invent models and project them, to think laterally, is not actually as common in the market as you might imagine." Not only that, but negotiating the avalanche of information is essential: "At the same time, in both corporate and government life, everyone is suffering from information overload. There is more data around than ever, thanks to the Net. Let us think of there being an information pyramid, with the most obvious Internet data down below, the highest grade - intelligence and wisdom - being up at the apex. There are a lot of newspapers, television programmes, academic monographs, marketing reports in between. The challenge for your discipline as for any other discipline is to try to feed in higher up that pyramid. In Britain, our New Labour government is experimenting in all sorts of interesting ways, constitutional and institutional. Quite often, from my point of view, their task would be easier if they understood their history a little better. I also have the feeling that, particularly in their approach to Europe, they need more of the right sort of political science. I will come back on that in a moment." Maclay goes on to give an example of how good political science can make itself heard and have effect: "I worked in the 1980s on a British television current affairs programme called Weekend World, which some of the Anglo-Saxon members of the audience may remember. We pioneered a few techniques of using basically academic or commercial material, to make political points: we exploited more rigorously than the newspapers opinion polls, qualitative consultancy techniques and focus groups to get at the way people thought about things. It won't surprise any of the British academics among you to know that Peter Mandelson was a central player in all of this." New Labour, of course, is obsessed by all of these techniques cited by Maclay. Weekend World was, from its inception, an unquestionably "political" show, except that its politics tended to override those supposedly being reported. In past posts I have referred to Peter Jay's doom-laden musings back in the 1970s. On leaving for Washington as ambassador, he was replaced by former rightwing Labour MP Brian Walden, who was another born-again Thatcherite. A clever, learned man, Walden had, with some distinction, stood up against electoral race-baiting in Birmingham in 1964, when another rightwinger, Patrick Gordon-Walker, lost his seat as a result of a disgusting campaign run by Peter Griffiths, who has only recently retired from Parliament. His slogan was, "If you want a nigger for a neighbour, vote Labour". (Incidentally, this little trip down Memory Lane is worth taking given the current developments in some English cities and the ratcheting up of the rhetoric by Home Secretary David Blunkett.) However, Walden had long since given up his Left pretensions and had reached the conclusion, like many others supposedly sympathetic to the left, like Bernard Ingham, Dick Taverne, Richard Marsh, Reg Prentice, and Paul Johnson (to name only a few) that "something had to be done", and that Thatcher was the one to do it. It was Thatcher's placeman at the BBC, Marmaduke Hussey, who appointed Walden's boss, John Birt, as director general of the BBC, effectively before the retirement of his predecessor Michael Checkland, who was too tainted as a BBC insider and associate of Alasdair Milne. All of this is relevant as we chart the trajectory of Michael Maclay, and recall earlier posts by Mark Jones regarding the struggle within the British power elite over the status of Europe. The "mission to explain" types were all favoured by Thatcher and her circle, until they became irrational (punk Thatcherites) concerning the EU. But the importance of Europe to the "mission to explain" types has remained, unaltered. If anything it has intensified, and lies behind Maclay's purpose in addressing this august body of European political scientists, as we shall see. Maclay expands on his experiences at LWT: "Much of the material we used came from political scientists who had been sitting on marvellous stuff, far better than they realised; and they, for whatever reason, had not managed to place it in context or to push it to the limit of its real potential. Many of these academics, in being confronted with our quite aggressive approach to their material, found it could work well for them, they became collaborators consolidated their position as political gurus. Others horribly disliked the lateral jumps we were making; they saw this as vulgarising good academic material and never really made their peace with our approach. And that is not to say that they were wrong. I would not presume to talk to you about what is scholarly and what is not; we were vulgarising, we were using the material in a different way from what was intended. Academic life has its own priorities and its own pace. But in the context of capitalising on what your profession brings to the community, it seemed to me quite a loss if this material did not reach the public it could command. I am glad that the approaches we pioneered were subsequently followed through, both by the more mainstream media and by the political parties, of course latterly by New Labour - far more successfully than by its rivals." So how are political scientists and their students to take advantage of all these opportunities? Maclay outlines three avenues: "The first one is working directly for companies, for chairmen, for their think-tanks, for board members who are looking at particular projects where they know full well they are not going to find the resource or imagination from within the company, from classic company men and women. There is one chum I have got in London whose background is political science through and through, and he is now the main speech-writer for the chief executive of one of the big Anglo-Dutch companies. How does he carry that off? There is a strong personal dimension to it, and a subset to that is the willingness actually to be the servant of the Great Man, which sometimes does not come naturally to an academic with his or her own self-respect. But there is a market there; it is not a huge market, but it is a growing market and an interesting one, and it is one offering scope to be entrepreneurial. "The second area that seemed to be the coming thing in the 1980s and that faded somewhat is the business of political risk: risk analysis, risk calibration. Many of you will know and might have worked for Oxford Analytica. There is Control Risks which does a little bit of this sort of thing. I had some direct experience in the 1980s of something called Global Analysis Systems, GAS. This was an outfit that thought like Oxford Analytica it could tap into academics ' downtime by capitalising on the fact that they would write for lower rates than journalists but would do so with more authority. The academics quite enjoyed it because they were able to write in quite an academic way and it seemed to require more wisdom and experience than up-to-the-minute reporting or evidence. It failed; it lacked the real selling proposition of improving on journalism and being on top of events from day to day rather than week by week. Oxford Analytica, which is much more successful, has to be bang up-to the-minute to compete with outfits like the Economist Intelligence Unit. "There is a third strand on which I can say a bit because Hakluyt, the company I work for, is active in this area. It is founded on the very entrepreneurial idea that there is a great deal of wisdom, knowledge, evidence out there in the world, but pulling it together with rigour does not happen so much. Just to sketch it out, what we do is we work for usually big international corporations, who have their own people commenting and recommending and actually on the job as operators, doing the business; and senior executives quite often need a second opinion, which will go into the politics and the personalities of what is going on. We work essentially in emerging markets, but increasingly we have found that it is not only in China, India or Vietnam, that there is not a level playing field in the market; but on the fringes of Europe and even at its heart, it is not always an entirely rational theory of market forces that determines who gets which contract. In what we do, we are not consultants, we do not try to run campaigns or strategies, but we provide information that consists of real insights from people. We do not take anything off the shelf, nothing off the Net - we assume that any company worth its salt has done all of that - but we go with the judgement of people who know the countries, the elites, the industries, the local media, the local environmentalists, all the factors that will feed in to big decisions being made. In the four years that Hakluyt has been going, it has been very successful, happily for us. "What we find is that journalists do this sort of thing extremely well - it is closest perhaps to what they do; but we use politicians, we use diplomats, we use business people. And we do use political scientists who stay in close and regular contact with the countries they know. On any given assignment, we will deploy a team of about five or six people, who will usually be unknown to each other, who will be working discreetly and letting us have reports that will be entirely their view based on what they see and hear. Their analysis will not be prejudiced by whoever has commissioned us or indeed by what Hakluyt itself might think; but we will get an honest read from different points of view which we then pull together into our own rather stern editorial product. There are some countries in which, but for the good political scientists we have on our books, we would be much less able to do the job. This is an area that I suspect is going to grow, and it will be entirely personally and entrepreneurially driven. Again, networks and niches, not nomenklatura." We have encountered Control Risks before, when we discussed retired UK General Michael Rose's colonialist tactics for Colombia, and which were very much an example of the colonialist logic employed by Suharto and Wiranto in East Timor, with the sudden emergence of "militias" which kidnapped civilians and are still holding many hostage in West Timor at present. Suharto, of course, was a beneficiary, however indirect, of General Walter Walker's campaign against Sukarno and his Communist allies. Now Maclay gets to his punchline: his current preoccupation. "Now my final word on Europe, since I was very interested in the remarks that were made before. This does seem to me one of the great market gaps: for thinking that is genuinely innovative, and does not simply reflect the concerns of vested interests in governments, political parties or the institutions of the EU itself. New thinking is necessary to generate ideas that will be saleable to ordinary people, and this requires something other than the rather condescending expert-speak of the politicians and the apparatchiks. I will leave you with this thought: if economic and monetary union suggests or requires a degree of political union which we have never seen before among sovereign states, what forms might this political union take, given the continuing vigour and legitimacy of national political cultures? Many of you might say: this sort of question is our bread and butter, this is what we are doing all the time. But first of all, if convincing answers to this question are around, they were very difficult to find when I was in search of them on behalf of Ministers in the last British government; and secondly, if they are indeed around, they need to be sold better. I would love to see political scientists finding a way of being more influential within this niche, so that at least in our domestic British debate, where good ideas are in desperately short supply, the Eurosceptics do not continue to call the tune." As Mark Jones suggested back in May, this issue is also preoccupying Maclay's former colleagues in the Foreign Office (inc. MI6), and is certainly a hot topic in Downing Street and New Labour's HQ at Millbank. Michael Keaney Mercuria Business School Martinlaaksontie 36 01620 Vantaa Finland [EMAIL PROTECTED]
