3/3 The IDCR - The bureaucratization process

For anthropologist David Graeber (2015a), we are now in an “age of total bureaucratisation.” We have entered a phase where public and private bureaucracy are essentially so interpenetrated that you can not tell the difference between them. International drug control policy institutions are in this matter particularly relevant as their functions and mandates inextricably exist between public and private matters. As we have seen, because of the constant need and demand from stakeholders for exactitude, fixed points and intelligible data (1), modern bureaucracies, such as the CND, UNODC and the INCB, have arguably become institutions “overwhelmed by a mad, Kafkaesque infrastructure of assessments, monitoring, measuring, surveillance and audits, centrally directed and rigidly planned, whose purpose is to reward the winners and punish the losers. It destroys autonomy, enterprise, innovation and loyalty, and breeds frustration, envy and fear.” (The Guardian, 2014) This is far from being an understatement, as witnessed first hand by the author of this thesis and many other observers of the U.N. administrative ways. A few months spent within a U.N. office have offered the spectacle of a workplace often filled with civil servants intending to protect their own power and prerogatives within an overall structure discouraging any potential for creative thinking as the official motto remains “please, don’t rock the boat.”

What is also striking is that in the matter of drug-related policies, countries have seemingly and willingly forfeit the right, but also the responsibility to engage and be accountable for policies that touch very closely most of its citizens. In this regard, what scholar Jonathan Caulkins (2015) notes is quite pertinent: “this suggests that countries may wish to concentrate policy making regarding international drug treaties in the hands of bureaucracies that are practiced in such strategic thinking and in the translation of analysis into effective practice for inducing desired actions from other nation states.” A growing number of observers are arguably viewing international bureaucracies as an indirect form of overall social control from the most 'powerful' states, upon the 'least' ones. This allows the intercalation of a so-called objective and neutral 'inbetweener' which has the double advantage of serving as a relay for dominating policies while being a useful scapegoat if something goes wrong.

We will first describe the U.N. drug control organizational chart and compare it to the Frankenstein’s monster concept, in order to better appreciate the bureaucratic specificities of the IDCR, most notably how they play in stunning the personal commitment, integrity and work ethic of individuals working within the U.N.

The U.N. drug control organizational chart and the “Frankenstein’s monster”

This chart shows how each related U.N. agency fits within the IDCR. We can place the CND and the member states that compose it as the foremost international institution in charge. UNODC (UNDCP on the chart) takes all its authority from the Commission and the power exerted by the major donors. In this regard we understand how every new intended resolution has to be primarily cost-evaluated and funded in order to be submitted and agreed upon. But as often, this chart can not fully represent the power struggles and subtle cultural practices that encompass such a system. If you take the ECOSOC, at the very middle of the chart; the body is supposedly in charge of coordinating all the other agencies work and to communicate its findings to the UN General Assembly (2). However, as Cindy Fazey teaches us, “the reality is that the specialised agencies are independent organisations only nominally under the aegis of the General Assembly. (For example,) INCB submits its annual report to ECOSOC through the CND, which may only comment on it if it wishes.” (Fazey, 2003)

However, this chart is also something else, as it represents the embodiment of the triple layers of securitization that have been developed in articles related to the Introduction of the thesis. Both researchers Grayson (2003) and Collins (2005), further explore the concept and have suggested that such process often produce a bureaucratic entity, a “‘Frankenstein's Monster’, whereby giving resources, power and legitimacy to the securitization, (and releasing) it from the ordinary checks and balances of normal policy making.” (Crick, 2012) Alan Collins (2005) uses the analogy to explain the “bureaucratic inertia” that many consider as defining the current IDCR, as well as a helpful figure in order to understand why once a topic has been labeled and accepted as a security issue, “challenging that assumption becomes extremely difficult.” (Crick, 2012)

As such, we understand that influential institutions, such as the UNODC and the INCB, in charge of the compliance surveillance and the day to day activities of the IDCR, remain closely connected to political elites that carried out the securitization process in the first place. Therefore, it is plausible to think that such bureaucracies “have a vested interest in maintaining their funding alongside their role in enforcing prohibition and thus continuing the securitization of drugs.” (Crick, 2012) Indeed, what could be more rational than trying to protect your interests if you are deeply invested into something? When many remain baffled by the longevity of the IDCR, we could, on the contrary, argue that the longer a system such a this stays in place, the more individuals have reasons and means to preserve and reinforce the status quo. For this reason, analysis of the specificities of such a bureaucratic system can help us understand why it is so resistant to change, and what could potentially be the triggers necessary to change it.

Bureaucratic specificities

In 1945, in the mind of the U.N. architects, many would have wished to see their own civil service workers (mainly at the time from the U.S. and the U.K.), take the mantle of such noble calling. The redactors of the U.N. Charter, completely occulting the bureaucratic nightmare that the League of Nations had become at the beginning of WWII (3), and in a classic sense of colonial sense of superiority, projected an idealized vision of the services potentially offered by their own administration. But following Allies governments (4) swiftly re-focused towards national interests and too few employees from their respective foreign offices were dispatched. There, the idea of an independent, public serving corps, whether it would have proved itself true or not in regards to Western standards, implicitly died on the spot.

This historical anecdote reveals to be quite pertinent in regard to where current U.N. civil servants’ loyalty may lie. As such, if “some UN personnel identify wholly or at least principally with the UN, others consistently ‘play their own side’, putting their national loyalties first. Consistent unity of purpose will always be difficult under such circumstances.” (Fazey, 2003) This is particularly relevant when pointing towards Head of agencies and Under-Secretary positions. These offices are almost always politically motivated and strongly tied to tacit agreement among major donors. If the head of UNODC has always been from Italy until the current Executive Director, it had to be because the country was the principal, if not the most important donor of the agency since its creation. Because the topic was deemed as fundamentally important in regard to their foreign and domestic policies, Italy, and now Russia, have successfully politically negotiated the office for one of their nationals. This practice has profound structural application “to the whole of the UN system from its inception to today, and revolve around the persistent interference of the major powers in the running and particularly staffing, of the UN.” (Fazey, 2003)

A similar way of analyzing the IDCR is to examine the social conditions created and reproduced by top members of a certain group, in this case, the international agencies civil servants operating the drug control regime at a level under the Executive Director. As Alex Stevens (2011) describes it, “our gaze could equally fall on the research bodies that create the drug use statistics and concepts of addiction that inform current drug policy, or on the entourages of the various national and international drug ‘tsars’ in the current regime of drug control.” Another point of consideration for anyone trying to embody change involves the supposed expertise and capacity of UNODC senior staff: “In many bureaucracies, in order to get rid of a disastrous manager who is sufficiently senior and well-connected or who has worked a long time with the organisation, they are moved on, usually by being promoted.” (Fazey, 2003)

The higher up the post and the stronger governments will fight in order to keep that person in place, as a replacement could be interpreted as a political failure from their part. If replaced by another nationality, a senior post should have to be given in compensation, somewhere else in the system. In this regard, efficiency, expertise and dedication to a topic are not obligatory considered as necessary to obtain a certain office. The talent of a bureaucrat is often expressed by other attributes, such as the art of blockade operations and to navigate the waters of a specific agency.

We ought to understand that a number of sensible offices within the U.N. hierarchy are to be included if a specific policy is to move forward. As most U.N. experienced diplomats would confirm, the art of maneuvering within international bodies is to know how to move around these potential blockages. Furthermore, “rarely do civil servants try to make or lead policy other than to suggest or articulate what Member States say that they want, partly because their greatest fear is of getting anything wrong. It is a philosophy of many bureaucracies that ‘it is better to do nothing than to be wrong.’” (Fazey, 2003)

In the U.N. and particularly within UNODC it is often taken a step further as “it is better not to start anything new because it might be wrong.” (Ibid.) Another demanded quality for such office personnel is often to be able to manipulate the system in which it operates. In Vienna, envisioned changes are often blocked by seniors staff, not by malice, but because of the irrefutable belief in the U.N. drug control conventions (5); not science or empirical evidence, but treaties ratified during the Cold War, before the age of internet, mobile phones and current worldwide drug practices.

In this regard, it could be argued that the complexity and sensitivity encompassed within drug polices should require that international agencies working in the field such as UNODC, base their actions and expertise on empirical scientific evidences while acknowledging the limits of the current informations humanity possesses on the matter. Consequently, “many bureaucracies are adept at evading empirical evidence when it goes against their own policies or beliefs. Some evasive methods are simple. First, neuroscience, statistics, economics and other sciences are complex and not too many people understand them profoundly enough to differentiate plausible and proven facts. Most people’s weak knowledge is obviated appealing to higher authorities. The use of experts’ testimony becomes a substitute for learning and understanding. Since it is easy to find qualified mercenaries in any field, it is possible to hire experts to support almost any position. Morals, ethics and values are important and everyone is entitled to his or her own opinions, but nobody is entitled to have those opinions validated by facts.” (Thoumi & Kamminga, 2004) The case of 'experts' will be studied more in depth, but we could argue that the most simple things could also be a catalyzer for irrational actions.

The sole principle that English must always be the working language of these institutions during meetings and policy documents drafting remains a decisive advantage, given to natural born speakers and countries. Even if we recognize the fluency of non-english speaking country representatives within the U.N. for, their respective national ministerial bureaucracies may not be as confident. This fact, which may seem evident to a non-english speaker reading this work, may very well not be for whom english is their first language. And this is a direct consequence of culture dominancy, which greatly impacts the work potentially done by non-english speaking countries. This potential means that dominancy is also greatly used in order to gain legitimacy in certain domains.

Additionally, in Habermasian terms (Habermas, 1996), we could see the production of global drug policies and norms as an attempt to regain legitimacy while a crisis is underway due to the widening gap between the legislator norms’ producing and interests, and the people who are impacted by it. Similarly, the personnel intending to protect the core of the regime as enforcer agents of a dominant paradigm. As explain by Alex Steven (2011), “strategic use of administrative power (such as the creation of selectively prohibitive drug laws) leads to a “steering trilemma” in which the administration's instructions are (firstly) not obeyed, (secondly) lead to further disorganisation and (thirdly) these instructions overstretch the capacity of the legal system and undermine normative foundations of the political system.”

David Graeber (2015) reminds us that the hatred of bureaucracy historically belonged to the political ideas of the long tradition of anti-state right-wing. Indeed bureaucracy criticism came primarily from the 19th century liberalism. In this regard, the language of the anti-bureaucratic individualism was taken with increasing ferocity by the right which claimed that the market was the solution to every social problem. But global bureaucracy has never been so impressive than at the time of the neoliberal paradigm. Rather than taking us out of it, neoliberalism is a rather morbid bureaucracy accelerator.

Many believe that the current institutions in charge of the global drug control regime will not be able to reform themselves as the deeply rooted bureaucracies they represent have probably too much to lose. In this regard, Helen Redmond (2014), has a blunt, but truthful comment to convey: “The career bureaucrats who staff the UNODC and the INCB are a gang of dangerous fossils who believe blindly and fervently that the Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs of 1961 is working just fine despite mountains of scientific evidence and piles of dead bodies that prove otherwise.” Additionally, as Cindy Fazey (2003) noted, “hierarchical authority structures (are not) necessarily effective. Numerous networks and friendship groups cut across rank and even organisations. These networks are overlapping and cross-cutting” and often achieve objectives through different means than the official ways.

As such, for those who thrive for systemic reforms, it remains necesary to overcome this paradox which makes us all swim in bureaucratic waters without trying to think about its effects. Instead of releasing the energy and creative minds, dominancy of neoliberalism remains the macabre triumph of technology, ie a political and social scene defined by control, monitoring and threat.

Current programs implemented by U.N. agencies are often “characterised by the reluctance of international administrations to rescind their powers on the basis that the administered state had yet to attain unrealistically ambitious targets.” (Hehir, 2011) This is particularly pertinent in the case of global drug control bureaucracies and their desired goal of a “drug free world”. As such, Baudrillard’s concept of “hyper-reality”, which we will later analyze more in depth, will be helpful to understand the promulgation of political and administrative norms produced by international agencies and which seem increasingly out of sync with reality. Similarly it should be noted, and similarly later explored, that the “key institutions of modernity, such as politics or bureaucracy are no longer seen as managers of risk but also as sources of risk.” (Beck, 2009)

These findings, are further reinforced by the calls for timid policy reforms and a greater system-wide coherence from other U.N. agencies, which have for a long time and in contrast with the Vienna’s drug control institutions triumvirate, argued for a more human rights and health policy orientations in regard to drug control. Ultimately, the results of UNGASS 2016 have deeply shown the growing irrelevance of the U.N. in the field of drug policy.

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(1) For several observers, “Through a magnificent paradox”, the creation of modern international bureaucracies, “has led to the revival of a grand old Soviet tradition known in Russian as tufta. It means falsification of statistics to meet the diktats of unaccountable power.” (The Guardian, 2014)

(2) Under Chapter 10 article 64.2 of the UN Charter, 1946, the ECOSOC “may communicate its observations on these to the General Assembly.

(3) For the relevant literature, the lecture of Belle du Seigneur from Swiss writer Albert Cohen is enlightening on the matter.

(4) Truman’s and Eisenhower's for the U.S. and Attlee’s for the U.K.

(5) As such, the problem of confirmation bias - the tendency of people to be trapped by pre-existing assumptions and to select facts that support their own views while overlooking contradictory ones - is a well-established finding of social science.

• (Beck, 2009) U. Beck, World at Risk, Chapter 3, the “Cosmopolitan Moment” of World Risk Society or: Enforced Enlightenment”, Polity Press, Cambridge, 2009.

• (Bewley-Taylor & Fazey, 2003) D. R. Bewley-Taylor & C. Fazey, “The Mechanics and Dynamics of the UN System for International Drug Control”, Forward Thinking on Drugs, March 14, 2003, http://www.forward-thinking-on-drugs.org/review1.html, Accessed: 16/03/16.

• (Caulkins, 2015) J- P. Caulkins, "After the Grand Fracture: Scenarios for the Collapse of the International Drug Control Regime", Foreign Policy at Brookings, 2015, Improving Global Drug Policy: Comparative Perspectives and UNGASS 2016, http://www.brookings.edu/~/media/Research/Files/Papers/2015/04/global-drug-policy/Caulkinsfinal.pdf?la=en, Accessed: 22/09/15.

• (Collins, 2005) A. Collins, “Securitization, Frankenstein's Monster and Malaysian education”, The Pacific Review, 18 (4) (2005), pp. 565–586.

• (Crick, 2012) E. Crick, “Drugs as an existential threat: An analysis of the international securitization of drugs”, International Journal of Drug Policy, Volume 23, Issue 5, September 2012, Pages 407–414, http://www.sciencedirect.com.proxyau.wrlc.org/science/article/pii/S0955395912000503#, Accessed: 22/10/15.

• (Graeber, 2015) D. Graeber, The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy, London, Melville House, 2015.

• (Graeber, 2015a) Lecture by David Graeber: Resistance In A Time Of Total Bureaucratization, Maagdenhuis Amsterdam, March 10, 2015, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ruS17ivinU, Accessed: 09/04/15.

• (Grayson, 2003) K. Grayson, "Securitization and the boomerang debate": A rejoinder to Liotta and Smith-Windsor Security Dialogue, 34 (3), pp. 337–343, 2003.

• (Habermas, 1996) J. Habermas, Between facts and norms: Contributions to a discourse theory of law and democracy, (W. Rehg, Trans.), Cambridge, MA, MIT Press, 1996.

• (Hehir, 2011) A. Hehir, “Hyper-reality and Statebuilding: Baudrillard and the unwillingness of international administrations to cede control”, Third World Quarterly, Vol. 32, No. 6, 2011, pp 1073–1087.

• (Redmond, 2014) H. Redmond, "The Die-Hard Drug Warriors", Counterpunch, May 23, 2014, http://www.counterpunch.org/2014/05/23/the-die-hard-drug-warriors/, Accessed: 17/02/15.

• (Stevens, 2011) A. Stevens, Sociological approaches to the study of drug use and drug policy, School of Social Policy, Sociology and Social Research, University of Kent, Medway Campus, Chatham Maritime, ME4 4AG, UK, November 11, 2011, http://www.ijdp.org/article/S0955-3959%2811%2900184-8/fulltext, Accessed: 22/04/15.

• (The Guardian, 2014) G. Monbiot, “Sick of this market-driven world? You should be”, The Guardian, August 5, 2014, http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/aug/05/neoliberalism-mental-health-rich-poverty-economy, Accessed: 22/04/15.

• (Thoumi & Kamminga, 2004) F. E. Thoumi and J. E.M. Kamminga, "The recent changes at UNODC and its role in advancing and innovating anti-drug policies: Old Wine in New Cleaner Bottles?", Paper presented on the occasion of the Second International Symposium on Global Drug Policy, Vienna, March 16, 2004, http://www.jorritkamminga.com/sites/default/files/A60_JK_Kamminga_Thoumi_UNODC.pdf, Accessed: 16/09/15.