Do you know who I am?

Anyone looking for a groundbreaking ethnography of the global political elite —the elusive social grouping that western electorates are currently lining up to slap in the face — is likely to be disappointed by this book.

In the course of these ‘Misadventures’ it is often stated that, for example, ‘At the UN, the bullshit meter is off the charts,’ or ‘the State Department is… full of self-importance and hot air… with very little tangible output. ‘The reader may have suspected as much; but rather than elucidating that world, Daniel Levin depicts ‘the powerful’ almost exclusively in the form of not very amusing or original caricatures, which troop by to dramatise, repeatedly, their ‘rampant sense of entitlement’, ‘incompetence and ineptitude’, and ‘silliness and ineffectiveness’.

A fraudulent think-tank consultant declares, ‘What a tremendous wit I am!’ and later demands, ‘Do you know who I am?’; an official from the UN Development Programme tells a room full of people that an untested theory about microfinance ‘is axiomatic, it cannot fail’; an ill-informed US congressman warns that ‘Where I come from, it’s generally not considered a good idea to correct a senior member of the United States Congress’; a Chinese Communist Party functionary demands, ‘Do you know who you are talking to? Do you? You will respect us! We were the Middle Kingdom, and we are now an empire again!’ And so on. The simple moral of each parable is the same: these people deserve that slap in the face.

But who’s the one having all these misadventures? Fortunately, all is not lost from a research point of view, since Daniel Levin, a Swiss-American son of a diplomat, graduate of Columbia law school, and current board member of the Liechtenstein Foundation for State Governance, more than qualifies — though he seems not to comprehend this — as a member of the global elite himself.