A note on Slovakian planning...

I've written about Slovakian planning before (a niche subject I know) but this is a reminder that when you've few land use planning controls stuff gets built pretty quickly:

Recently, I returned to Slovakia. One day, while driving through the capital of Bratislava, I noticed a brand new suburb that covered a hill that was barren a mere two years before. The sprawling development of modern and beautiful houses came with excellent roads and a large supermarket. It provided a home, privacy, and safety for hundreds of families.

How was it possible for a private company to plan, build, and sell an entire suburb in less than two years, but impossible for a communist central planner to build one small building in almost a decade?

The article's actually a cautionary tale for young people explaining the evils of communism. But for me this paragraph stood out because there's no way that you'd get a new suburb built in the UK within two years from scratch including roads, buses, supermarkets and schools. Perhaps we need to learn some lessons in liberty from the now free Slovaks?

The clue, after all, lies in that word 'planning'. And it's the main reason housing markets don't work properly.

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Ludovic Stur and the revival of Yorkshire identity - a nationalist romance

This piece of modernist statuary is a memorial to Ludivic Stur - the words below the monument describe him as 'Slovensky Narodny Buditel'. Roughly translated this means 'Slovak National Revivalist', which describes what Stur did (at least according to the Soviets):

Štúr studied philosophy and philology at the Bratislava Lycée from 1829 to 1833 and at the University of Halle from 1838 to 1840. With J. Hurban and M. M. Hodža, he carried out a reform of the literary language that based the language on the Central Slovak dialect; he organized the cultural and educational society Tatrin. From 1845 to 1848, Štúr published Slovenskje narodňje novini, the first Slovak political newspaper, and a literary supplement, Orol tatrański.

In 1847 and 1848, Štúr was a deputy to the Hungarian Diet. At the Slavic Congress in Prague in 1848 he demanded recognition of the Slavic peoples’ rights to free national and cultural development. He took part in the Prague Uprising of 1848, and in the Revolution of 1848–49 he led the struggle of the Slovaks for national liberation.

But I'm not here to talk about the birth of Slovakian nationalism although it's worth noting that it took over 170 years from Stur's revival of the Slovak language to the creation of the first independent Slovak state. And it's that independence - or the idea of independence - that I'm struck by here. So let's speculate by talking about Yorkshire, remembering while we do just how long it took to realise Stur's Slovakian dream.

Here's something from a Yorkshire regionalist party in the recent European elections:

We would like to take this opportunity to thank the 19017 that put their faith in a different future. We salute you for giving life to Yorkshire First. The fight goes on to convince all parties that the time for change is now. It is time for Yorkshire

Yorkshire has a larger population than Scotland and an economy twice the size of Wales, but with the powers of neither. We support the devolving of powers to the least centralised authority capable of addressing those matters effectively – within Yorkshire, the United Kingdom and Europe. 

We can have a little giggle at such a ridiculous idea - there's never been an independent Yorkshire, this is just some sort of indulgence. Except that this is how such ideas start - with a romantic dream such as Ludovic Stur's idea of Slovakia. I know that the Soviets paint him as some sort of noble revolutionary but the truth was that he was just a man who was steeped in the language and culture of the place he called Slovakia. And in the first instance it is that cultural identity combined with a romantic view of past and future that creates nationalism.

The origins of Scottish and Welsh nationalism don't lie in the dry world of economics or even in the technocratic, ideology-free statism of Alex Salmond. Those origins lie in the myths and legends of these places, in the vaguely remembered events of the past, in a set of wrongs felt unrighted and in the saving of language from extinction. These romantic ideas - the spirit of nation, if you wish it - are what makes separatism a possibility not dry analysis or logic.

Checking on Wikipedia reveals a long list - over 100 organisations that in one way or another seek independence or greater autonomy. And there's an association, the European Free Alliance, that brings together about 40 separatist political parties including the UK's Scottish, Cornish and Welsh nationalists. And these movements are making progress - we know of the independence vote in Scotland and may have spotted the recognition of the Cornish as a nation. But there's more - tens of thousands of Basques formed a human chain to call for the Spanish government to grant them an independence vote. There's an ongoing debate in Catalunya where the regional government wants a vote but the national government is trying to prevent this happening. We saw an on-line poll showing overwhelming support for secession of the Veneto from Italy (and the arresting of some separatists in a weird tank incident).

There is no certainty in nationhood or in the boundaries that are drawn to create those nations and we are fools if we believe these things to be either eternal or sacrosanct. Nations only remain nations by consent - where that consent is taken for granted or worse abused then the case for change, which will nearly involve a new nationalism, is made. We look at Europe and see the EU, a sort of Frankenstein's monster version of the Holy Roman Empire filled with unaccountable and distant bureaucrats governed by entitled autocrats who owe their power to patronage rather than the will of Europe's populace. Add in economic collapse on a scale, for Southern Europe especially, not seen since the aftermath of the last world war and we have the recipe from fragmentation, for that cherished multi-culturalism to descend into distrust, blame and the desire to break from the state that led people into this disaster.

I'll finish by coming back to Yorkshire and that sense of identity, the essential first ingredient for nationalism. How many medals did Yorkshire win at the Olympics?

Some say it’s the Yorkshire water. Others say it’s the Yorkshire beer. But Nicola Adams, born and bred in God’s Own County, is in no doubt over the reason for Yorkshire’s stunning success at the Olympic Games.

‘It must be all those Yorkshire puddings,’ she said in the aftermath of her historic boxing gold medal, the first ever won by a woman at an Olympic Games.
 

When Luke Campbell, proud son of Hull, fought his way to a boxing gold medal by defeating Ireland’s John Joe Nevin in the bantamweight final, he took Yorkshire’s medal haul at London 2012 to five golds, one silver and two bronze.

If Yorkshire was a country, as some of its more fanatical supporters might prefer, it would be 15th in the London 2012 medal table, just behind New Zealand but ahead of sporting giants South Africa, Spain and Brazil.

In past Olympics (the ones where we managed to win medals that is) this regionalism was never noted but suddenly, when the Games are back in London, that sense of Yorkshire pride is apparent and rampant. So when Yorkshire coming knocking at Britain's door saying "we want what Scotland's got" it will be a brave government that turns them away.

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Bratislava, or why people would rather do low paid jobs in the UK

Bratislava Castle and Cathedral Church from the Danube

Chances are that you've not been to Bratislava. I mean why would you unless you had a hankering for the old capital of Royal Hungary, to pop into the places built by those Hungarian nobles as they whiled away the centuries somewhere other than Hungary (the Turks were running Budapest back then I gather).

Hold on. Isn't there an oddity here? Hungary? But isn't Bratislava capital of that ultra-new state of Slovakia? How did that happen then if it was so much a centre for the old Austro-Hungarian lot rather than the northern Slavs? What happened was part of the bizarre combination of lottery, plebiscite and bad decision-making that created boundaries after the first world war (when the Austro-Hungarian Empire ceased to exist) and then jiggled them about after the second world war. Meaning that today Pressburg, in whose church Emperors were crowned, is now called Bratislava and is the capital of Slovakia.

We paid a short visit to Bratislava so this is as much an impression as a considered analysis of politics of economics in the Slovakian capital city. And we were tourists, doing tourist things like visiting the cathedral and sitting in pavement cafes watching the world go by.

A few things will strike a visitor to Bratislava: every second building seems to be either an embassy or else to have the word 'narodny' prominently in its title - 'narodny' means 'national' in Slovak. Where there is a public square it will have a splendid piece of recent statuary celebrating a nation hero: here's the one for Ludovit Stur, leader of the 19th century Slovak National Revival:

 

All this sounds pretty splendid but Bratislava has a problem. Despite the capital status, all those embassies and national institutions, the city feels like a place with little purpose. In truth a poor place with little purpose. The streets are quiet - we were there at 9am on a work day and it was less busy than Harrogate on a Sunday - and for every grand building there is a tatty row covered with graffiti, a broken door or a little shop selling not much more than a few boxes of sad looking fruit and veg.

This is the capital city of a country with five-and-a-half million people. It ought to be buzzing, filled with people making, creating, entertaining and building a nation. It's not. And I can understand why a young, educated Slovak (the sort who are guiding tourists round the city, telling them just how awful communism was and how it left them so badly off) would decide that nursing a clapped out car to Dortmund, Rotterdam or Birmingham has more appeal that trying to make a good life in their homeland.

Which is why there are multilingual graduates working in English bars and cleaning Welsh hotels. And why the killing of chickens in Cullingworth is exclusively done by emigres from places like Bratislava. And why should I blame them for doing that? Or prevent them from having that opportunity to do a crap, low-paid job in Britain?

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