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Published on 2024-08-11 23:00:00 | words: 2606
Rationale
This series of articles is actually split across few subsections:
_ before
_ after
_ negotiation
_ activation.
Of course, the reference is to the events covered by this series within the "commentary" part.
Anyway, the same concepts are applicable in any negotiation activity.
There is always a "before", where you prepare for the first step: getting into a phase where you are shortlisted into a negotiation.
Somebody in the past called it about building up and giving a first impression.
And, generally, it is about being able to position for your intended audience (something that described at length in my only mini-book published so far in Italian, that you can read also on strumenti).
There are still too many that assume that this "before" is about projecting their own best image, based upon what they would consider best.
That you need to attract voters, or get pre-selected by a potential customer, this anyway requires something different: be relevant to the target audience.
Interestingly, voters are more tolerant of broken promises than customers, notably in countries like mine (Italy), where sometimes had elected members of the Parliament who during the same term switched political party not once, but a handful of times.
In business, this might instead affect not just the "vote" (purchasing choice) of the individual potential customer: "word-of-mouth" can be a double-edged sword.
The "before" phase might be long or short- but usually being voted into office as well as being pre-selected as potential supplier have to be properly processed to develop into a long-term political or business relationship.
Decades ago, there was a couple of books written by the founder of IMG, starting with "What they don't teach you at Harvard Business School". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_McCormack
When in the late 1980s was first sent in London to attend a pre-sales training, it was on a specific "niche", i.e. solution sales to senior management (specifically, we were selling decision support systems), the approach was really on that "relational" line- which does not remove the "data-based" part, but requires some preliminary digging to understand better the rationale of your counterpart.
Within the series of books about Foundation and Empire from Isaac Asimov, there was a concept about studying but also influencing not individuals, but masses.
But my favorite description is from an older book "Die Macht des Charlatans", from 1937, written by Grete De Francesco, a book that read (for now) in English a while back, after reading quotes here and there.
A dozen years ago, somebody in Italy resurrected another relatively old book from Germany, this time 1930 from Thomas Mann, "Mario und der Zauberer", again about the same theme.
For obvious reasons, it the 1920s-1930s were probably the right times to write about inflated promises and "Pied Piper" effects, which results in WWII.
A century later, many of those themes still resonate, albeit this time the "tools" available, both physical and financial and technical, are significantly more powerful and possess a characteristic that, until the Wannsee Konferenz, usually wars had carried along in Europe since the end of the Western Roman Empire, did not have.
Before the development of nukes and the physical and conceptual integration of our economies that was shown blatantly more during the COVID crisis than in any of the prior financial crises (e.g. 2008), generally the damages from a war were reversible- of course, not for all those directly involved, but for society, and we were used to say "time will heal wounds".
The XX century delivered industrialized warfare on a scale never seen before, and made genocide on a non-local scale possible and also non-reversible.
The Holocaust unleashed according to those few hours of decision-making at the Wannsee Conference created a monster that taught a lesson to most of the wars that followed.
Like it or not, genocide after WWII became a structural element of many conflicts, but despite the appearance of "emergence" was structured: Rwanda, the Yugoslav wars, others before and after, all were structured on targeting civilians, not just the "war resources" of the counterpart.
Like it or not, while I attended that training in London about "solution sales", it was before all the other wars structured around genocide or even just targeting civilians and civilian infrastructure, but the potential of manipulative and "psyops" embedded in relational approaches never escaped me, and since the 1980s in business I saw often something straight from the pages of Bernays' "Propaganda" (1928, you can find it online), or its predecessor (1923) "Crystallizing Public Opinion".
Within the most recent articles of this series, discussed the post-elections preparations, which are also what happens after many negotiations, when you are selected.
Or even just pre-selected: you might lose that specific one, but having passed that threshold, means that the potential customer can "position" you and your offer, which is something worth in and by itself, both with the specific customer (for future business) and for "word of mouth" dissemination of information about your organization and its products and services.
If you read again this part of what is going to be a short article, you can see that my "second phase of post-election preparation" is about something that it is often forgotten, i.e. what we stand for- or, to use the title of a fortunate series of propaganda movies from WWII "Why We Fight" (you can find them e.g. on archive.org).
Then, all the preparation work that you had (the planning, not the plan, to echo the late President Eisenhower), will start paying.
Of course it will be different from what you had hoped for, but if you had worked correctly, probably you had already considered the scenario you are in, and could pick from your own preliminary planning material what could be integrated into a new planning phase, shifting from "winning" (a negotiation phase, a contract, a number of seats in Parliament) to "operating".
Now, after this preamble twice as long as my usual "rationale" section in this article, will do something different: will try to keep short and direct the next section.
Commentary
If before was about preparing the lists, now it is about preparing the European Commission so that it can "hit the ground running" when is needed.
I know that from the title you expected a discussion about the European Commission itself and its Members, but, frankly, that is a matter of cross-EU politics and balancing power and access.
Good for Trivial Pursuit games as those that I attended weekly at the Old Oak in Brussels while living there over a decade ago, but not to produce impact.
And, personally, I always go beyond the propaganda, and look at data and impacts.
Frankly, I do understand that summer is vacation time (as I see each Monday when I compile the list of new articles etc from the European Central Bank for my search engine started in 2019).
Anyway, hearing journalists utter about the European Union role in recent events in Gaza something akin to "deafening silence" is not really a good starting point.
While, at the same time, we keep committing more present and future resources to repelling the invasion of Ukraine by Russia, to keeping its economy (up to the Government current expenditure) afloat, and even starting to funnel resources for the reconstruction of Ukraine.
If we assume that the war in Ukraine and Gaza will end soon, of course it makes sense to start now preparing, but it also makes sense to do what, as a citizen, asked from the time when we sent the first military and economic aid bypassing the niceties that the USA used in the first phase of WWII to support UK without becoming a co-belligerent.
Or: if we support a strategic initiative, we need to have a say in the definition (and redefinition, including adjustment to reality on the ground and foreseen availability of resources and trained personnel, not just "hardware") of the strategy.
Otherwise, as I wrote on Facebook few days ago, we are getting our own dose of the "Monnet" approach: we said "we will give you equipment but to be used only for defense", then when it went into counter-attack mode in Kursk, we signed-off ex-post on the validity of the initiative, which of course resulted in more and deeper counter-attacks within the territory of Russia.
Of course we cannot accept the new "status quo", as then the risk would be to have a Sudetenland situation a century later- and I think that no elected politician would like to be waving an agreement stating again "peace in our times", just to see then the Baltics or Poland territory shrinking maybe not directly, but through a third nation.
Wiser people in Brussels and Mons are probably already revising their plans and concepts after the latest rounds of "boiling the EU frog"- getting into the conflict slowly but without a direct choice, and will find the right balance and right posture to safeguard interests without reneging promises.
As you probably know, I follow since 2020 the NextGenerationEU, from its inception, to its implementation (focusing of course on Italy).
Probably "follow" is a bit of an understatement, as since 2020 published, as of 2024-08-10, 75 article.
Anyway, the initial "package" overall was around 750bln.
Now, those who met me in Brussels from 2005 probably remember when I uttered that Italy was on the path to add few hundred billions of national debt soon, and was criticized by Italians (and friends): only to be confirmed more than once by reality- I will let you search what I wrote in the past about the Italian national debt (albeit most of my articles from 2007 until 2012 are currently offline).
I kept an informal tally of all the direct and indirect promises made to Ukraine to keep it within the conflict (what I described at the beginning as a collective position of "we will fight against Russia up to the last Ukrainian fighter").
In my view, we should not do what our USA allies did in Vietnam at the end of the conflict (when even the Italian navy sent warships to take on board refugees escaping a while after the conflict formally ended), or in Afghanistan, or in Iraq: we convinced and supported them to stay into the fight, we should support them after the fight, both in rebuilding and integrating within the European Union, as they started a "fast track" toward becoming a Member State.
Personally, I disagreed with the move, as I found it not bold but superficial, and even a little bit more than insulting to other candidate Member States who had to harmonize their own legal system, or, in the case of Turkey, kept finding that each step there was a new reason to say "maybe in the future".
Why superficial? Well, the not so stellar performance against corruption, to begin with, and the doubtful level of "regulatory convergence" with the European Union.
If we are, eventually, to commit to Ukraine a package comparable to that committed for the 27 existing Member States within the NextGenerationEU and further measures and initiatives since 2020, I think (no surprise here) that we European Union citizens are entitled to have more transparency on plans, and reassurances on the strategic guidance, with a roadmap for the integration of Ukraine.
NextGenerationEU was a strategic choice with (potentially) strategic projects that should generate future sustainability and revenue streams that will enable to pay the cost of all those measures.
So far, all the piling up of promises to Ukraine I do not see how will be structured to ensure guidance, oversight, and avoid wasteful allocation of resources, to benefit both the population of Ukraine and those that will foot the bill- the European Union citizens.
Considering the commitments so far, and considering the not-so-stellar performance in managing the resources given, frankly I expect that potentially the whole "Ukraine support initiative", so far discussed in the order of hundreds of billions, could easily balloon into a size similar to what we did since 2020.
Unless there is clear direction, monitoring, transparency, we risk doing what many Member States in part did: recover existing projects from drawers, to support current voters, while shifting the cost to future generations.
In this case, due to the novelty of the overcomplex European Union regulatory framework, it is doubtful that Ukraine, also without a war, would have been to integrate as fast as some promised.
So, there is a distinctive risk of having resources allocated to rebuild from scratch a modern industrial base in Ukraine (what was not done fully for former COMECON EU Member States), generating internal competition to attract direct industrial investment from existing Member States.
I remember that when decades ago Poland was on a path to enter, contacts from the Baltics told me that they saw that German companies that needed a "place" did not just purchase what they needed, purchased the whole building, expecting then to benefit from that.
And by modernizing and rebuilding from scratch an obsolete industrial base, probably existing Member States could see some of their industrial base, courtesy of European Union resources, shift to Ukraine (and its expected lower salaries and anyway high level of education).
So, while speeches now talk about supporting Ukraine, we should demand from the European Union leadership something more, something that was missed e.g. while discussing the green transition.
You cannot just have Zealots of green before and Zealots of Ukraine integration now, and forget that any change implies a transition and offsetting temporarily (phase-in, phase-out) the impacts on the incumbents.
Otherwise, you have a recipe for social conflicts: existing Member States with increased welfare costs to support their own transition will also have to foot the debt to make themselves less competitive.
We need a systemic approach, but since 2019 we had just a piling up of initiatives.
So, whatever the names that will compose the European Commission structure (not just the two-three top layers), what matters is what the overall system is sustainable.
Otherwise, in five years time, hoping that the war will have ended, we will have to discuss about the consequences.
Stay tuned.