Blog 11. Travelling with a different purpose. What travel ads and stories miss: the way people live, the political and economic vibes of a country. 

I tried to see the real Greece, Croatia, Bosnia, Chile and Cuba  

Why don’t I want glamour, scenery and cultural events? Like millions of other Europeans I was tossed about on the winds of mid-twentieth century history. It made me keenly interested to find out how my scattered-round-the-world family lived and see how well my father’s choice of Australia as our destination home when we were post-world war II refugees has worked out. Therefore for me travel has an important precise purpose. Travel writers extol the glamour, scenery, adventure, food and cultural events but rarely describe what I’m looking for in countries: a run-down of the way people live, the economy and political situation, how a place is governed. I go on tours with knowledgeable guides. Sometimes they produce the information I need well enough but most times I have to hunt for it elsewhere as well. I know it’s hard to conclude the state of a nation from a couple of weeks observation, but I do. In my feelings as a “citizen of the world” I pursue information on how well globalized are the freedoms I have learned in Australia. And as a long time worker in Australian governments, I look closely at government in the places I visit. 

Where have I been? In my trips to Greece, Baltic countries (Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia) Croatia, Bosnia, Chile, Cuba, I saw my values tested. I also have visited China, Phillipines and Cambodia where similar serious political and human rights transgressions occur but I will not comment on them this time. 

Greece was a charade

My 2019 trip to Greece was enjoyable because of a learned and engaging guide who conveyed to us brilliantly the Greek myths and tragedies and magic of a glorious history. However in many places we saw the decaying present day economy in empty buildings and poor infrastructure and saw the flagrant disobedience of EU rules of financial reporting by businesses which openly offered goods at lower prices if we paid by cash (to avoid the seller having to declare it and be heavily taxed on each transaction) On the bus returning to Athens on the final day I asked her what was the Greek take on Brexit and whether Greece would consider leaving the EU. Over the loud speaker in response we heard an amazing 20 minute diatribe about how the EU and world-wide conspiracies had ruined Greece, diminished its culture and ruined its glorious presence in today’s world.  We all squirmed but didn’t dare respond.  Greece is in a political and economic mess which tourist dollars cannot fix. Apparently every Greek feels the desperation of this failed economy and failed government. And that is the lasting impression that stays not the fun of learning Greek history. Inequality, corruption and incompetence in government is prevalent and has not been overcome in ten years of EU trying to fix it.

Smaller Baltic States have Succeeded, Croatia hasn’t Because I visited Croatia with my father on his first blissful return to an independent Croatia in 1991 and saw how disorganized and confused the newly independent country of my birth was, and because I thought Croatia didn’t have critical mass needed to thrive, I went on a tour of the Baltic states: Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia so see how they had managed to survive and thrive despite aggressive Russian interference and their small populations, much smaller than Croatia’s 4.5 million.  Through several European guides as well as local guides, we heard the same explanation of these States’ economic reivival and push-back against Russian intrusions: the EU had saved these small countries by offering security, study and work opportunities in other European countries while their schools and universities and industries and governments recovered. After joining the EU in 2013, why hasn’t Croatia succeeded, even now in 2020? The answer is inequality, corruption and incompetence in government.  I despair that Croatia also seems to be unable to overcome its post world-war 2 identity crisis.  However in January 2020 Croatia elected a social democrat President Zoran Milanovic vowing to make Croatia a “normal decent liberal democracy with an equal society and an independent judiciary”. Lets hope that this time he can do as President what he couldn’t do when he was Prime Minister from 2011-2016

Bosnia and Herzegovina: the Pinnacle of Failure  

I also have relatives in Bosnia and Herzegovina where the situation is worse, much worse. The peace deal that Richard Holbrooke negotiated in the 1995 Dayton Accords was meant as a temporary warstopper but it set up a labyrinthine single sovereign state with two parts: the Serb Republic and the Croat-Bosniak Federation. This setup created a diabolical decentralized political system that undermined the State’s authority, gave each party what they asked for, led to 25 years of deadlocked decision-making on ethnic divisions rather than shared ideals (Wikipedia). My relatives complain there are three languages, three religions, three education systems and three levels of government in each of the balkanized localities in the country’s crazy patchwork map where entire budgets are spent on paying politicians. There is a single school building in Mostar with Muslim children on one floor taught in a religion, language and curriculum different from the Croatian children on another floor of the same building, Foreign soldiers still keep the peace there. When we were there in 1991 before the genocide 1992-1995, ethnic cleansing atrocities were already being committed around us and reported on TV! It was like living in hell on earth for us for a few days but it continued for years for my relatives. The international Court of Justice has prosecuted three Serb leaders: Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic and Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic whose territorial claims led to the war. However many lower level ethnic cleansers and human rights abusers continue living in their traditional villages often amongst neighbours they had tried to remove. This is not inequality, incompetence and corruption of the kind we know, it is institutionalized, consitutionalised inequality and impotence and ingrained corruption of an order I can’t explain or understand.  This is a failed state like no other in the west.

Chile Revisits Violence in 2019 Despite Advancement over 30 Years  In my first trip to Chile to visit relatives for six weeks of 1975/76,  I experienced without warning the shocking early days of the Augusto Pinochet regime when people were disappearing and soldiers were causing mayhem. Subterranean  whispers abounded and my relatives fell into two political camps so it was impossible for me to make any sense of what I was told. No news media, just people grapevines and priests conveying what little they knew on Sundays. This revolution had been set up by the American CIA pushing Pinochet to stage a coup against a democratically elected socialist president Salvador Allende. Forty years later in 2018 when I visited for the fourth time Chile seemed to have come to terms with this sad history and was even playing a benevolent role taking in large numbers of refugees from Venezuela, Ecuador, Peru and other unsettled South American countries. Then in 2019 Chile suddenly exploded into violence in the streets again. According to my relatives this time the causes were inequality, corruption and incompetence seething beneath the surface throughout the thirty years of democratically elected socialist and conservative governments elected in 1990 after the final ouster of Pinochet. Chile is regarded as the most advanced and democratic of South American countries and I thought had a successful economy, but I was wrong.  

Cuba Still the Last Bastion of Communism

In 2016 after visiting Mexico , we went to Cuba on a small group of 2 tour. We had a knowledgeable sociable former English teacher guide and a friendly taxi driver who helped reduce the heat from the broken down airconditioning. Our guide explained that Cuba was an egalitarian society with everyone earning the same pay irrespective of qualifications or what work they did, everyone got the same monthly ration cards and only the state could own property. With Fidel Castro’s passing, his brother Raoul had opened up some parts of the economy to small businesses and to tourism.  That’s why our guide moved from teaching to tour guiding – for the tips that tourists gave him which gave him more income to a point where he hoped to buy a house for himself, his aunt and his adult daughter. That would be a long process because only some houses were available for purchase. He took us to a grocery store where everyone brought their monthly ration cards and were given their allocation of that month’s food eg 2 kg rice, fruit etc. All the Caribbean music and dancing in the world couldn’t lead one to see this as a land of freedom and fun.  We drove all over the island and saw many disused agricultural and factory buildings no longer operating. Broken down cars, tractors and rusty equipment were everywhere. There are also rundown empty schools from a time when the government encouraged city children to go to school and live in rural areas for a good communist education. This practice has stopped. Over decades, the USSR had built much of the transport infrastructure and buildings with large annual grants which dried up in the 1990s when the USSR broke up. In fact Cuba’s economy had been totally dependent on those grants and when they stopped Cuba stopped. What annoyed me most were the huge old fashioned roadside propaganda hoardings  “We are still fighting the World Revolution” and “Keep up your efforts, we will win”. They even had English language newspapers promoting their revolution aimed at us tourists.   This government was a failing dictatorship refusing reality: this kind of equality didn’t appeal to anyone and the lack of expertise and resources to govern led to small time corruption and large scale incompetence that even our guide said was embarrassing.

Three conclusions are clear Although these failures and problems in Greece, Croatia, Chile and Cuba are very different from each other, they all fail because of inequality, corruption and incompetence in governments. In the first three: Greece, Croatia and Chile, governments have been elected in democratic voting by people choosing incompetent corrupt governments who make inequality.  Bosnia and Herzegovina is different because it has inequality, corruption and incompetence mandated by outside peacemakers who actually put it into a Constitution. These peacemakers came form the US and European democracies: they created a monster. (And now Bosnia wants to join the EU! How is that possible with that Constitution?) 

Secondly Australia which does has small amounts of inequality, corruption and incompetence but is a great expression of fundamental political and economic freedoms and rights to its eclectic mixture of people is truly a lucky country, a place I’m absolutely happy my father chose for us.  

Thirdly despite the stark differences between Greece, Croatia, Bosnia, Chile and Cuba there are clear emerging political and economic trends: there is a decline of old ideologies and identity crises, there are increasing demands for political and economic equality, increasing recognition of corruption and increasing demands that  governments perform. People see is an emerging global civilization offering higher quality of life and they want it too. These trends give me hope.

What’s the Big Idea Here?  Can These Countries Fix Themselves?

I’m reading a great book by Yuval Noah Harari an Israeli Historian: 21 Lessons for the 21^st Century which is pointing to the inevitable globalization of our civilization.  “In previous centuries national identities were forged because humans faced problems and opportunities that were far beyond the scope of local tribes and which only countrywide cooperation could hope to handle. In the twenty first century nations find themselves in the same situation as the old tribes: they are no longer the right framework to manage the most important challenges of the age. We need a new global identity because national institutions are incapable of handling a set of unprecedented global predicaments. We now have a global ecology, a global economy and a global science – but we are still stuck with only national politics”  (P126)  Hopefully globalization will continue the march of progress and reduce inequality and  remove corruption and incompetent governments.

ZJ 31 January 2020