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This is: Jean Monnet: The Guerilla Bureaucrat, published Martin Sustrik on the LessWrong.
I have written about coordination problems from various points of view in the past (biology, economics, sociology, political science) but this time I am about to focus not on the theory, but on the practice.
Jean Monnet was one of the founding fathers of the European Union. One may even say that he was the architect of the European Union. However, as founding fathers go, he was rather unusual. His background was unusual: He was neither a political leader, nor a lawyer, a philosopher or a military commander. He was a son of a brandy merchant from the small town of Cognac near Bordeaux and himself a merchant by trade. He dropped out of school at sixteen and never got any extensive formal education.
But also his approach was unusual: He never held an elected position, he has never put himself to the forefront, he almost never made big speeches and is not known for memorable quotations. Rather, he was always in the background, busy with the boring technical work, hanging around politicians, showing them his famous balance sheets and trying to convince them to do the sensible, if unexpected, thing.
He was, in fact, so undistinguished that, when Fortune magazine run a story about him, they have given up on inventing a proper title for him and introduced him simply as "Monsieur Jean Monnet of Cognac". But whoever he was in his life - a trader, a banker, a civil servant - the only description that truly fits is that he was a solver of coordination problems.
The Monnet Method
This article will explore what Mario Draghi (former president of European Central Bank, and now, quite unexpectedly, the Italian prime minister) calls "the Monnet method", a bunch of principles that guided the effort to unite the continent divided by centuries of incessant wars and feuds.
But while Draghi is focusing on the lessons that may be relevant in the current state of the European Union, my interest is a bit broader: How does one solve coordination problems in general? And how does to do it as successfully as Jean Monnet once did?
In this article we are going to examine that question. Yet, before we begin, a warning is due. Monnet himself, in his memoirs, refuses to write down his method:
I might have written a series of practical maxims; but I distrust general ideas, and I never let them lead me far away from practical things. I have described the dramatic events I have lived through and the lessons I have learned from them, in the hope of preventing their happening again. My purpose is very practical. Some may call it a philosophy, if they prefer: but the essential point is to make it useful beyond the experience of one individual.
And that, I think, is not Monnet being modest. It's the core of his approach. The only way to break out of inadequate equilibria, to solve the coordination problems, is to take advantage of the unexpected. Everything that is expected, after all, just feeds into the equilibrium and makes it persist. And to take advantage of the unexpected, one should not bind himself to a specific, predictable method.
Bypassing the Hierarchy
One recurring theme in Jean Monnet's life was working outside of the existing institutions. The common sense would have it that to change how Europe works, he should have found a humble job at French ministry of foreign affairs and work his way up the hierarchy until he had enough say to push his ideas forward. Instead, it's 1914, the beginning of the Great War. Monnet is 26 years old and has no prior political experience:
One of our friends at Cognac was a lawyer, Maitre Fernand Benon, who happened to know René Viviani, the Prime Minister, quite well [...] and he agreed to introduce me to [him].
Viviani said to me: "Sir, I gather that you have some interesting propos...
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