In the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis and the Brexit vote that put the euro under strain and called into question the viability of the Union itself, the gaps between transnational-led policies and national interests, political priorities and cultural identities have become wider due to the declining trends of economic growth and unsustainable social promises. This book offers new insights into the challenges and opportunities brought by EU integration policies by taking as a case study the process of accessing EU funding in Romania and its impact on the performance and reproduction of contemporary entrepreneurial identities.
After joining the EU in 2007, Romania could access up to ā¬20 billion by 2013 (The Economist 2012) through EU funding structural and cohesion programmes and a further ā¬23 billion by 2020. In May 2017, the Romanian Minister for EU funding reported a 90% access rate for 2007ā2013 in a conference regarding the impact of EU funding in Romania organised on Europe Day. She further added that EU funding had a net positive effect on the economy, having positively contributed to the national gross domestic product by 13.6%, lowered the unemployment rate by 3.7% and created approximately 100,000 jobs.1
This success story was somewhat toned down by the European Commissioner for Regional Policy, Corina Cretu, who urged the Romanian authorities to āmove from talking to actingā as ātime is running out of patienceā: ā2017 is a crucial year. I assure you that if I could implement [projects], I would go myself to the construction sites, but unfortunately, I have nowhere to work because [ā¦] for example, the most advanced [highway] project is not yet in the construction phase.ā Corina Cretu further noticed: āEU funds represent the only way to reach the average standard of living from the Western countries.ā
The president of the Romanian Chamber of Commerce and Industry argued for reducing the bureaucratic formalities necessary for accessing this type of funding making reference to his own experience: āthe man speaking to you has [personally] signed and stamped page by page [a project of] 26,200 pages for a trans-border project in Constanta. The management authority [which meant] four people in the same office asked for one original document each. I was right to tell them that I deserve a van to carry the papers (ā¦) I do believe in resetting the formalities that need to be done.ā The president of the Federation of unions of construction companies said: āThe workforce in construction is 300,000 workers. 100,000 is allegedly not qualified. In two years, we are going to need over half of million workers and we are not going to have them on the market. There is no legislation to bring contingents from outside the EU. The legislation for professional development, fiscal inefficiencies and public acquisitions and the release of construction authorisations will have minimal results. The consequence is that the [EU funded] projects will be blocked.ā Last but not least, the vice president of the Economic and Social Council summed it up: āā¦the money circulates from West to East and the workforce from East to West. EU funding should mediate this situation. The problem is that people are losing confidence in EU funding. The Ministry should rebuild trust in these institutions and in the capacity of EU funds to solve development issues. The dangers for 2014ā2020 are not related to the commencement of the project bids. In 2018 we anticipate a major deficit of liquidities.ā
These accounts nicely sum up some of the main issues around the topic of EU funding in Romaniaāthe access rate, the economic impact of this funding, the failures encompassed by the inevitable delays, the excessive bureaucracy, the dissatisfaction associated with it and the enhanced levels of distrust in this funding. All these issues should be interpreted in the context of scarce workforce, lack of liquidities, institutional development and political transition.
Furthermore, official reports and journalistsā reports have uncovered dubious arrangements that involved high-level officials, stories of fraud or misuse of funds and entire projects fully funded by the EU that existed only on paper. Probably the most famous case involved the former minister of European IntegrationāHildegard Puwakāwho distributed EU funds to firms controlled by her husband and her son.2 The ongoing investigation had started in 2003, and she had to answer not only to accusations of fraud but also to accusations of corruption.3 Another high-profile figure accused of EU funding misuse by the Romanian Anti-corruption Directorate is the Archbishop of Tomis. He was put under judicial control in May 2017. The anti-corruption prosecutors even requested the measure of house arrest, but the judges rejected the request.
However, beyond these (sometimes) scandalous accounts and dry quantitative assessments, there is little research about the people and practices of accessing EU funding. How do EU anti-corruption policies, practices and assumptions frame the process of accessing EU funding in Romania? What does ācorruptionā mean in this context? How much corruption is there in the area of EU funding? This book aims to fill this gap by providing an ethnographic account of EU funding in Romania. In doing so, it pushes forward the understanding of EU funding as a space of interaction between global, European and local forces, while unpacking the assumptions, policies and practices behind the regulations that govern it.
This is a very timely project both practically and theoretically. Firstly, it has direct implications for particular geographical areasāfor example, Central and Eastern Europe, which reflects indirectly on Western Europe as the main EU funding policy centre, while discussing potential governance implications for Eastern Europe. In its latest anti-corruption report issued in February 2014, the European Commission stated its concern regarding the mismanagement of EU funding warning that it ācan lead to interruption and/or suspension of payments until appropriate corrective measures have been taken by the Member State, including the strengthening of the management and control systemsā (EC 2014: 26).4
Secondly, a striking feature of the booming literature on EU funding and deviance is how the comparatively small number of ethnographic studies is easily overshadowed by quantitative assessments, policy papers and secondary sources. For example, a recent World Bank review noticed that only 2% of the relevant scientific literature on corruption is covered by anthropological studies (in Torsello 2012). This book contributes to this line of ethnographic fieldwork-based studies, following the contemporary, but not-yet-established, practice of hyper-comparative trans-local ethnographies that analyse a concept while retaining the sensitivity to the context and that deconstruct the moral indignation associated with big concepts like organised crime (Hobbs 2013), (il)legal trades (Nordstrom 2007) or corruption (Ledeneva 2013b). Such studies are based on flexible, distinctively qualitative methodologies, while retaining an āethnographic attitudeā (Haraway 1997) not confined to a set of methods. To a certain degree, they are similar to studies from the sociological tradition of the Chicago School (Cressey 1932; Polsky 1971/1967) and its followers (e.g., Cohen 1971; Downes 1966; Hobbs et al. 2003) that are based on sustained critical effort to understand the context-specific social interactions and interpretative schemas of peopleās āworldsā (van Maanen 1995). In the same fashion, this research was conducted from an appreciative position hoping to present EU funding as a complex, exciting, dull and messy space of interaction.
I conceptualise EU funding as an arena of transnational policy construction that allows for interaction between new institutions and entrepreneurial practices, political gestures and vernacular routines of doing business. This analytic perspective is particularly apt to catch innovation in practices employed or the emergence of new actors and markets (e.g., EU funding consultancy) that are both a product and a source of wider societal changes. The main argument of the book is that EU fundingāas an economic process shaped by EU anti-corruption practices, policies and assumptionsāconfigures new political and economic subjects through intertwined vocabularies of corruption and crime, a mix of formal and informal entrepreneurial practices and commodification of finance. This dynamic process concomitantly enables Romaniaās top-down integration into the EU through the adoption of transnational regulations, institutions and anxieties and Romaniaās bottom-up integration into the EU through the assimilation of the EU funding regulations into the vernacular practices of doing business.
Even since the inception of the EU, one of the most important issues faced by the European leaders envisaged sustaining the EUās expanding agenda and development policies encompassed in EU funding while protecting its financial interests. Historically, at the transnational level, anxieties associated with EU funding misuse have materialised in heightened regulations that employ the vocabularies of crime and corruption. In 2007 after the second Eastern Enlargement, when Romania and Bulgaria joined the EU, these anxieties reached paroxysm because in these countries corruption was perceived as a societal condition. Such a medicalised view called for vigorous treatment, and the European Commission imposed a set of āconditionalitiesā that entailed enhanced surveillance in order to curb corruption while designing even stricter regulations for EU funding eligibility and control. This book assesses for the first time the effects of such heightened regulations on the process of accessing EU funding and on corruption, showing that their main effect is to increase the costs associated with accessing EU funding and thus exclude a wide range of applicants. By discussing the association between corruption and EU funding regulations in Romania, this book shows that EU funding as a development theme was metamorphosed into corruption, a crime theme. The book investigates the rebranding mechanismsāthat created new labels for vernacular ways of doing things, changing the meanings associated with contemporary entrepreneurial practices or reporting the present in a language compatible with global anxieties related to corruption.
Even though transnational entities and the state proved their potency by imposing regulatory control over the EU funding economy, they failed to make it accessible. Hence, a new market force took over this task: consultancy appeared at the intersection of bureaucracy and local entrepreneurship in order to mediate between the two spaces and decode the highly technical eligibility idioms of EU funding. As market-makers, consultants commodify EU funding, treating eligibility criteria as production factors. In this sense, the growing transnational articulation of European integration is not a form of cultural domination by the EU over the local, but finds its embodiment in the appropriation by the local elements of EU funding in order to formulate new and innovative economic and social forms. Consultants are unique elements in this equation, as they are deeply embedded in the local histories, thus familiar with the inclusive morality of informality, but also highly literate in the exclusive idioms of EU funding. By discussing this unanticipated process of market-making through EU funding, this book contrib...