Graftology

What do we mean when we talk about corruption? The answer, suggests Ivan Krastev in a new book reviewed by Quentin Reed in Transitions Online, is far from clear, and the implications are enormous.

Shifting Obsessions: Three Essays on the Politics of Anticorruption, by Ivan Krastev. Central European University Press, 2004. Paperback, 120 pages. $14.95.

Corruption. One of the greatest evils of modern society: a defining feature of communist countries; the scourge of post-communist transition countries; an increasingly recognized problem in advanced democracies; a disease spread by multinationals in developing countries. There is virtually no other phenomenon, real or imagined, around which there is such widespread agreement. That corruption is the evil of modern developing and transitional societies has become an article of faith in the development community, international financial institutions, and the influential part of the non-governmental sector that focuses on corruption issues. The quintessential multilateral institution – the World Bank – has gone even as far as to define corruption as the single greatest barrier to advancement in the developing world.

All concur on the evils of corruption, and, as on perhaps no other matter, all agree, in theory anyway, on the need to make corruption fighting a top priority. Just as surprising, there is also wide acceptance of the specific policies that are needed, at least in terms of the rhetoric shared by the lending and development agencies and the countries to which they provide assistance: anti-corruption drives underpinned by “political will” at the highest level and more or less neo-liberal policies to reduce the role of the state in the economy.

For these reasons, it is refreshing and healthy to hear a skeptical voice. The Bulgarian political scientist Ivan Krastev’s short collection of three essays is a bold attempt to dissect and challenge the foundations and substance of the “new anti-corruption consensus.” His main concern is not primarily corruption or corruption fighting, but rather why anti-corruption policy has become the “obsession” of his title, what its intellectual foundations are, and to what extent the anti-corruption policies yielded by the consensus are well-founded and feasible. 

The dogma

His main theses are stark and clear. First, that the anti-corruption consensus is less the result of a locally led response to burgeoning corruption by organizations such as Transparency International, and more the result of policies imposed by multilateral agencies to legitimize the stabilization or liberalization policies they seek to impose on less-developed countries, backed up by and coupled with the efforts of the United States in particular to enforce a level playing field abroad for its own corporations. Add to this a fast-growing anti-corruption NGO community that has been receptive to the consensus and, in Krastev’s view, the result is a powerful alliance. In the case of post-communist countries – his central interest – he might have added another impulse: the obligations to pursue more “effective” anti-corruption policies imposed by the European Commission on candidate countries.

The second major thesis is that the elevation of corruption to international Public Enemy Number Two (after terrorism, of course) has been given a massive boost by the emergence of an essentially pseudo-“science of corruption.” In the past 10 years, corruption has suddenly become “measurable,” largely thanks to the impact of Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index, a weighted average based on results of surveys of perceptions of corruption in each country. The index has served both as a hugely influential PR tool for spreading the obsession and – more seriously – to provide analysts with “data” enabling them to “prove” the damaging effects of corruption. 

Krastev rightly indicates, although he does not state explicitly, that the new science is fundamentally flawed. Perceptions are not reality – witness the increasing perception of corruption in the Bulgarian customs agency after revenues appeared to be rising as a result of the outsourcing of the customs administration (as an explicit anti-corruption policy) to a British company. The definition of corruption inherent in indicators of perceptions is often unclear and sometimes non-existent, making it impossible to tell even what it is exactly that survey respondents are communicating their perceptions of. 

Defining terms

This leads Krastev to argue what is probably his most fundamental point: that perceptions of corruption in post-communist countries are a reflection of general dissatisfaction with transition (and especially rising inequality), not an indicator of actual levels of corruption. The best research on corruption in transition countries supports this view; for example, focus group surveys in Central and Eastern European countries carried out by William Miller and his collaborators revealed a wide gap between citizens’ perceptions of corruption (high) and their actual experience of corruption (much lower).

Taking this line of reasoning further, Krastev casts doubt on the judgment common among citizens of post-communist countries that corruption is more widespread than it was under communism. Here, he observes that the difference in perceptions has to do with the impression that the corruption specific to communism was socially acceptable (“do me a favor”) whereas in transition states, corruption takes a more conventional form that is perceived as unacceptable (“give me a bribe”). Full discussion of this theme is material for an independent volume, and the differences between communist and transition societies are of such a nature that quantitative comparisons are probably futile. Indeed, Krastev might also have noted – as the Open Society Institute has – that even existing corruption surveys do not show clearly that post-communist countries are more corrupt than Western European democracies.

To read the review in full, visit the Transitions Online website.