Anticorruption Campaigns:  How to Get Rid of Paradoxes and Inconsistencies
by Arista-Maria Cirtanutas

International organizations will have to go well beyond their current anticorruption efforts if they want to succeed. They will have to rely more on grassroots organizations and drop their unrealistic zero tolerance demands, and instead, tap into local customs and traditions. The author also suggests that economic and political elites should be held accountable to their own citizens.

Consistent with the recent recognition by international organizations such as the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank that markets will not function properly in the absence of states, they are now paying increasing attention to substantive questions of good governance. As an overarching concept, good governance focuses not only on the appropriate parameters for liberal, capitalist institution building, but also on the standards for appropriate conduct within these institutions. Accordingly, the international development community is devoting ever more rhetoric and resources to the problem of corruption, given the extent to which corrupt practices can subvert the formal institution building process by undermining professionalism, administrative efficacy, and, ultimately, democratic legitimacy.

Even though the local costs of corruption were presumably just as or more burdensome in the days of the Duvaliers and the Idi Amins, the violence of such regimes, the end of the Cold War, and the dynamics of globalization have created new conditions. Under these conditions the corrosive effects of corruption are even less acceptable to international organizations because they are less containable. Consequently, "the fight against bribery and corruption," as the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) puts it, has assumed global proportions that extend beyond the organization’s own 1999 Convention on Combating Bribery of Foreign Public Officials in International Business Transactions to include efforts being undertaken by the European Union (EU), the Council of Europe, the Organization of American States, the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, the World Trade Organization, the United Nations, the International Labour Organisation, and even the Open Society Institute. Extensive monitoring and training programs have been established under the auspices of these organizations to promote public administration reforms; strengthen control mechanisms; and perhaps most important, educate both elites and publics in affected countries that the "cancer of corruption," as described by World Bank President Wolfensohn in his 1996 annual meeting address, is a serious matter.

An impressive, almost missionary effort in the form of anticorruption campaigns and international conventions is under way to convert the hearts and minds of people around the world to a universal set of norms and principles defining ethical and professional conduct. While the international organizations promoting this new "climate of civic responsibility and ethics" ("Corruption in Poland: Review of Priority Areas and Proposals for Action," World Bank, Warsaw, October 1999; and "Assumptions of Poland’s Anticorruption Strategy," 2001, http://www.worldbank.org.pl/html) are often supported locally by concerned citizens and public officials, the heavily promoted, supposedly universal standards are clearly derived mainly from idealized Western standards and are meant to supersede local customs and practices. The OECD convention, for example, states that bribery is an offense regardless of "the value of the advantage, its results, perceptions of local custom, the tolerance of such payments by local authorities, or the alleged necessity of the payment." Even seemingly harmless "common practices, such as gift-giving to employers, superiors, et al, in positions of influence, are inherently inimical to procedures such as formal tendering."

Perhaps nowhere is this internationally orchestrated "clean-hands" campaign more evident than in the efforts to combat corruption in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. Because of their geographic proximity and growing economic interdependence, not to mention pending EU membership for at least four or five countries in the region (the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Poland, and Slovenia), the dangers posed by the "contagion of corruption" have spurred Western efforts to promote anticorruption measures throughout the region. As these measures have not yet met with overwhelming success, the EU, as the most concerned Western organization, continues to voice its reservations, most recently in its 2001 "Enlargement Strategy Paper" (http://europa.eu.int/comm/enlargement), the annual progress report for candidate countries. The paper points out that "previous reports identified corruption as a serious problem exacerbated by low salaries in the public sector and extensive use of bureaucratic controls in the economy. This assessment remains largely valid, although several positive developments have taken place. In most countries anti-corruption bodies have been strengthened, and progress has been made in legislation, in such areas as public procurement and public access to information. Encouraging developments in several countries as regards the reform of public administration also contribute to the fight against corruption. Notwithstanding these efforts, corruption, fraud and economic crime remain widespread in many candidate countries, where they contribute to a lack of confidence by the citizens and discredit reforms. Continued, vigorous measures are required to tackle this problem."

Given the attention focused on this fight against corruption, especially in Eastern Europe, and the orchestrated international effort behind it, how can the ongoing failures be explained?

Most obviously, one can blame the vested interests that local politicians and civil servants have in resisting anticorruption measures that would reduce their opportunities for graft and rent-seeking. This is clearly the answer favored by many Western experts and advisers who bemoan the lack of political will in the transition countries.

One could also point to the resiliency of customary practices of local communities where corruption functions not just as an instrument of exclusion and privilege, but also as a mechanism for individual survival and resistance to externally imposed rules of conduct. Just as the U.S. war against drugs has run aground, in part because of the intransigence of drug-producing communities whose livelihoods depend on the drug trade, so too ordinary people, not just corrupt elites, will resist the fight against corruption. The former might understand the problematic nature of their conduct, but may still depend on corrupt practices simply to get by.

While both explanations are doubtless relevant, a third factor may also provide some insight into why Western anticorruption campaigns have not been as effective as hoped in Eastern Europe and elsewhere. Along with the vested interests and the practices of the targeted populations, the paradoxes and inconsistencies of the anticorruption efforts themselves may also have diminished their impact.

At first glance the current campaign appears quite comprehensive and well laid out. For example, having learned from past mistakes, international organizations are now quite cognizant of the need to involve civil society in the campaign against corruption rather than relying solely on elites who can too readily bend anticorruption campaigns to their own purposes. Accordingly, organizations from the World Bank to the OECD and the EU all agree that "as stakeholders in the quality of governance and as intermediaries for communication between the populace and the institutions of the state, the organizations that comprise civil society can be essential in constraining corruption" (Anticorruption in Transition: A Contribution to the Policy Debate, World Bank, Washington, D.C., 2000). On a similar note, the World Bank’s 1999 report on Poland cited earlier concludes that the assistance of civil society is essential to establish "priorities and modes of operation. And it will also be important to tackle public apathy if anticorruption efforts are to have any credibility and command the support they need to be successful." In building anticorruption coalitions, international advisers are energetically pursuing—as necessary and desirable—partnerships with civil society organizations. They view these relationships as crucial, not just for the constructive synergy that can result from state-society interactions, but because the widely recognized public apathy regarding these matters, especially in Eastern Europe, represents a formidable stumbling block.

In addition to engaging the social dimension, international anticorruption strategies have also become more multifaceted, going beyond legal and technical enforcement mechanisms in the attempt to create a culture of decency and integrity-based ethics management. Remarkably, nothing less than a fundamental human transformation appears to be at stake in which cultures of hypocrisy are to be transformed into cultures of virtue and professionalism. Perhaps realizing that markets require not just states, but also civilized conduct, the international community is now intent on promoting such apparently indispensable "protecting principles" as public duty and professional commitment.

While more encompassing and ambitious than past anticorruption efforts, the current campaign is flawed in both design and implementation for a number of reasons.

Whereas Western states are simply invited to overhaul their fundamentally sound systems of governance, by contrast, East European states are told that they must engage in substantive reforms as a condition of membership in the Western club as represented, for example, by the EU. While qualitative differences in governance between Eastern and Western Europe certainly exist, given the recent, very public problems of corruption in France, Germany, Italy, and the EU itself, not to mention the atmosphere of electoral fraud and disenfrancisement surrounding the last U.S. presidential election, greater attention could be devoted to the shared problems of political corruption and weakened democratic legitimacy.

Disjunction between the stated intention of involving society at large in the effort and the continued emphasis on the role of elites is a less obvious, but critical, inconsistency in the design of the international anticorruption undertaking. For example in the transition from the vicious circle of monopolistic rent-seeking to the virtuous circle of diminished control rights and limited discretion, transparency, and accountability is assumed to rest almost entirely on the shoulders of "decisive political leadership" capable of pushing through the necessary reforms. As these same political leaders remain located within the unreformed structures highly conducive to corruption, the fact that the required anticorruption leadership has not been forthcoming in Eastern Europe is hardly surprising. Even in a country like Poland, where the media and the public are quite well informed about the existing levels of corruption and where every effort is being made to pass all the right laws mandated by the international community, the World Bank is still waiting for decisive leadership to move beyond formal compliance to a substantive transformation of the system of governance.

Rather than waiting for a deus ex machina committed to battling corruption from the top down, a more profitable approach might be to focus on bottom-up, socially integrated solutions capable of altering the overall public environment in which elites operate and to which they are accountable. This type of engagement with social actors would, however, have to be sensitive to prevailing public opinion in Eastern Europe regarding politicians and state administration in general. For the most part, people appear to agree that public officials will always steal, but that they should also keep such activities within certain rules or boundaries. Under these conditions, the zero tolerance anticorruption campaign international organizations favor is likely to be deemed unrealistic, if not hopelessly naďve and needlessly rigid. Even if "low pay is no excuse for illegal or unethical behavior," as the OECD’s elaboration of an "ethical infrastructure" asserts, populations struggling to survive are unlikely to be sympathetic to such puritan pronouncements. Thus the focus should shift to provoking public discussion of what exactly the self-limiting rules and boundaries in any given institutional setting should consist of.

From a sociological perspective, corruption can be analyzed not just in terms of the unethical or criminal use of public office for private gain, but also in terms of the bonds of reciprocity and interdependence that structure the interactions between elites and the public. If significant groups in a given society believe that a breakdown in these bonds has occurred and that restoring relationships of respect and trust is vital to the government’s stability, then international efforts could usefully be directed toward helping to reestablish such bonds. International organizations must accept that these will vary from case to case and, more to the point, will no doubt deviate from idealized Western standards. If, however, communities see local social networks as adequate or necessary guarantors of their survival, such networks are unlikely to be amenable to reform, no matter how corrupt outside observers deem them to be. Anticorruption campaigns must therefore genuinely resonate with local community concerns regarding the extent to which the norms and practices of reciprocity have eroded, thereby posing a threat to the community’s very endurance. By tapping into the values of the local "moral economy," anticorruption campaigns could well succeed in diminishing truly harmful corrupt practices over time. This might not occur in the revolutionary led-from-above sense envisioned by today’s advisers, but amelioration as an evolutionary development predicated on social—as opposed to purely political or sweeping cultural—transformations might well come about.

Because the EU’s Phare programs for civil society development in Eastern Europe had previously come under critical scrutiny and been subjected to budget cuts, the EU’s capacity and will to develop state-society partnerships have been curtailed, especially in the most ostensibly developed East European countries. Instead, as the date of enlargement draws nearer, concern has shifted toward establishing the proper "control environment" in the leading candidate countries to promote sound financial management via internal supervisory and auditing procedures.

The narrowing of the EU’s focus to civil service reform may pose additional dangers if the outcome is the creation of closed mandarin-like elites with greater accountability to the EU than to their own citizens. We have already seen the extent to which nongovernmental organizations in the region can become more accountable to international donors and supporters than to their own communities. Teaching professionalism to East European elites in Brussels and elsewhere in Western Europe or training them in the twinning procedures established to provide Eastern European administrators with Western European advisers and partners will, no doubt, enhance efficiency and promote merit-based appointments. However, whether this type of training will result in administrators responsive to the needs of their citizens is doubtful in the absence of parallel funds and attention paid to the development of social actors who can demand responsiveness.

In remaking local elites in their own idealized image, Western organizations may well be forging bonds of respect and trust between international and national elites, which will help to contain the contagion of corruption. But if this protective firewall for the West comes at the expense of reinforcing the moat that already divides postcommunist politicians and civil servants from their own populations, the social cost in Eastern Europe will be immeasurable.

The author is assistant professor of government and foreign affairs at the University of Virginia. This article is an abridged and updated version of her article "Corruption and the New Ethical Infrastructure of Capitalism," published in the spring/summer issue of the East European Constitutional Review, a joint publication of the New York University School of Law and the Central European University in Budapest.