Corruption and EU enlargement: who is prepared?

Corruption and EU enlargement: who is prepared?

As the European Union draws closer to the
historic moment when it will formally invite ten candidate states
to join its club, the question that is increasingly asked is “Will
they be ready?” The question is not just about harmonisation of
domestic law with the acquis communautaire, it also concerns more
general aspects of the candidates’ political and economic systems.
One of the most important of these has been corruption, and the
answer to the question may be that the most urgent need for
preparation is within the EU itself.

The European Commission has repeatedly
identified corruption as a serious or systemic problem in at least
half of the candidate states of Central and Eastern Europe. Reports
published recently by the Open Society Institute’s EU Accession
Monitoring Program confirm many of the EU’s worries about
corruption in candidate states. Indeed, the reports go further in
highlighting problems of corruption in areas that the Commission
has largely neglected, notably “capture” of the process of
lawmaking by private interests. Moreover, the reports find that
even in areas to which the Commission pays close attention, notably
public procurement, harmonisation with EU standards has done
relatively little to reduce corruption.

Although corruption has not been perceived as a
serious enough problem to prevent these countries from fulfilling
the EU’s “Copenhagen political criteria” (essentially, that
democratic institutions are secure and stable), the Commission is
clearly not yet satisfied. In a speech marking the release of the
2002 Regular Reports on candidates’ preparedness for succession,
Commission President Romano Prodi labelled corruption as an
“extremely serious” problem which needs to be remedied before
accession.

Clearly, problems of corruption will not be
remedied before accession. As Czech Minister of Interior Stanislav
Gross recently noted, fighting corruption is “a long distance run”.
History – whether it be Germany after Hitler or Spain after Franco
– shows that corruption flourishes in transition situations, and
that the fight to bring it under control is better measured in
decades than electoral cycles. This will be the case in most
candidate states, where corruption is not rooted only in
transitional chaos but also has deep historical roots.

Moreover, corruption is an area in which the EU
has no clear and well-enforced framework of its own. Barely half of
the current member states have ratified the EU’s own 1995
anti-fraud convention. Individual member states do not even provide
information on corruption in any systematic way. Recent reports by
the Council of Europe’s Group of States against Corruption (GRECO)
– the only organisation that is currently monitoring the vast
majority of European states according to broad principles of
anti-corruption policy – noted that no overall statistics are
available on corruption cases in Greece or Spain.

The EU has also been unable to persuade member
states to adopt existing instruments. For example, only three
member states had ratified the Council of Europe’s Criminal Law
Convention on Corruption by June 2002. By contrast, armed with the
Copenhagen mandate, the Commission had helped convince all but two
of the CEE candidate states to do so by the same date.

If these reservations only indicated that EU
countries resist the imposition of uniform standards in a sensitive
area of criminal law, the argument might be made that this is not
such a bad thing. However, there is significant evidence that a
number of EU member states are troubled by significant levels of
corruption, ranging from the Elf Aquitaine affair in France to a
spate of major party financing scandals in Germany. These are the
first and third largest countries in the EU. The corruption
problems of the EU’s fourth largest country, Italy, are well-known.
Neithe r Italy nor Austria are members of GRECO; all candidate
states are. All this raises the inevitable question of whether the
EU is able to do anything, given its current institutional
constraints, to fight corruption EU-wide.

The record so far suggests it is not. A recent
report by the UK National Audit Office noted a 75 precent rise in
detected fraud involving EU funds from 1999 to 2000. More worrying,
most of the increase was accounted for by better detection in the
UK, while in a number of countries no cases of fraud were detected
at all – bringing smiles to the faces of Eurosceptics. The report
by GRECO on Greece adds a chilling note: according to local
observers the most corruption-plagued area in Greece is the
allocation and distribution of EU funds. Greece and Italy are
ranked in perception surveys as slightly more corrupt than the
least corrupt candidate states (Estonia and Slovenia).

Add to this the fact that the majority of
candidate states are clearly ranked by perception surveys such as
those used by Transparency International to construct its
Corruption Perception Index – as well as business surveys carried
out by the World Bank – as significantly or much more corrupt than
member states, and some of the risks of enlargement become clear.
Under these circumstances, the big EU enlargement question becomes
not whether candidates are ready for the EU, but whether the EU is
ready for them. Once candidate states are invited into the club,
the Copenhagen mandate ceases, and a considerable number of
countries with significant or serious corruption will enter a Union
that lacks a functioning anti-corruption strategy of its own.

Under these circumstances, the EU urgently needs
to beef up its corruption monitoring mechanisms, and establish
anti-corruption standards across the Union – and not only in the
area of criminal law. Bribery – which can directly undermine
implementation of the acquis – is clearly the Commission’s main
focus. However, other kinds of corruption, such as corrupt
political party financing, may undermine the transposition of the
acquis into national legislation (and in several cases in candidate
states probably already have), not to speak of undermining the
democratic values on which the EU purports to be founded.

The upshot of this is that the Union needs to
find a way of ensuring that adherence to the Copenhagen Criteria
remains a requirement – of all member states. As far as corruption
is concerned, the clearest way to pursue this objective is for the
EU to join GRECO, adopt the Council of Europe’s 20 Guiding
Principles for the Fight Against Corruption, and participate in the
development of the Principles and GRECO’s monitoring framework.

Quentin Reed is the editor of a series of
reports on corruption in the candidate states of Central and
Eastern Europe for the EU Accession Monitoring Program of the Open
Society Institute.

EUMAP has published a series of reports
assessing the impact of the EU accession process on the development
of human rights and rule of law policies. Reports are available
at:

www.eumap.org/reports.