Corruption

Anthropological Perspectives

Dieter Haller, Cris Shore, Dieter Haller, Cris Shore

• Publisher: Pluto Press
• Year: 2005
• ISBN:
  9781783715336
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Política y relaciones internacionales
• Subtopic: Proceso político

Corruption in politics and business is, after war, perhaps the greatest threat to democracy. Academic studies of corruption tend to come from the field of International Relations, analysing systems of formal rules and institutions. This book offers a radically different perspective - it shows how anthropology can throw light on aspects of corruption that remain unexamined in international relations. The contributors reveal how corruption operates through informal rules, personal connections and the wider social contexts that govern everyday practices. They argue that patterns of corruption are part of the fabric of everyday life - wherever we live - and subsequently they are often endemic in our key institutions. The book examines corruption across a range of different contexts from transitional societies such as post-Soviet Russia and Romania, to efforts to reform or regulate institutions that are perceived to be potentially corrupt, such as the European Commission. The book also covers the Enron and WorldCom scandals, the mafia in Sicily and the USA, and the world of anti-corruption as represented by NGOs like Transparency International.

1	INTRODUCTION – SHARP PRACTICE: ANTHROPOLOGY AND THE STUDY OF CORRUPTION^1

Cris Shore and Dieter Haller

The context for this book was set by several incidents, foremost among which were the dramatic fraud and corruption scandals that rocked corporate America at the end of 2001 following the collapse of the US energy corporation Enron. Some authors have predicted that in years to come the Enron scandal, not the terrorist attacks of 11 September, will be seen as the greater turning point in US society² – an unlikely claim, but one that invites us to ask what deeper lessons are to be learned from an analysis of what happened.³ Enron’s demise was precipitated by revelations about its complex financial manoeuvres designed to hide debt and conceal its various offshore and off-balance sheet partnerships. These were created in order to give a false impression of the company’s profitability and make millionaires of its senior managers. Its success in both of these aims was exemplary – at least in the short term. However, in December 2001 Enron filed the largest bankruptcy petition in the history of the United States. Three months later, Enron’s accountants Arthur Andersen were also indicted on criminal charges of obstruction of justice and ‘knowingly, intentionally and corruptly’ inducing employees to shred documents relating to Enron (Gledhill 2003). The sheer magnitude of these accountancy scandals was unprecedented, as was the fact that they occurred at the heart of the US financial system. Yet barely three months later, in June 2002, they were eclipsed by an even larger scandal when the global telecoms giant WorldCom was discovered to have inflated its profits by $3.8 billion – a figure later revised upwards to a staggering $7 billion.⁴

What is significant about these events from an anthropological perspective is that they remind us that Europeans and Americans cannot assume that grand corruption is something that belongs primarily to the non-Western ‘Other’ or to public-sector officials in defective state bureaucracies: corruption (both massive and systemic), we should not be surprised to learn, can also be found in the very heart of the regulated world capitalist system. The Enron and WorldCom affairs also provided a fitting backdrop to the international panel on ‘corruption’ that met in August 2002 at the 7th European Association of Social Anthropologists’ conference in Copenhagen.⁵ Significantly, we met in a nation-state ranked the ‘second least corrupt country in the world’ according to Transparency International’s (TI) ‘Corruption Perception Index’. To borrow a phrase from Shakespeare, all would seem to be remarkably well in the Kingdom of Denmark. But what exactly do indices like ‘second least corrupt’ or ‘most corrupt’ country mean in this context, and how should we interpret such measurements or the moral claims they produce? Is corruption something that can be quantified and rated in such an abstract and disembodied manner, and how accurately do measures of people’s ‘perceptions’ reflect the ‘reality’ or complexity of how corruption is practised or experienced? As these questions indicate, the aim of this book is to interrogate the idea of corruption as a category of thought and organizing principle, and to examine its political and cultural implications. The overarching question that frames our analysis is ‘What contribution can anthropology make to understanding corruption in the world today?’ As the contributors to this volume show, looking at corruption from an anthropological perspective necessarily draws our attention towards problems of meaning and representation, rather than the more conventional institutional approaches and theoretical model-building that seem to characterize so much of the corruption studies literature. To embark on such a project, however, we must first ask what exactly is corruption, and how useful is this term as an analytical concept? What are the conditions that encourage corrupt practices to flourish, and how are such behaviours manifested and interpreted in different contexts?

Part of the reason for opening up such arguably intractable questions is to counter the tendency among governments and policy-makers engaged in the anti-corruption movement to bring about a premature closure on the question of how to define ‘corruption’ as an analytical category. According to the World Bank, that whole debate is now effectively closed. ‘Corruption’, it confidently asserts, is ‘the abuse of public office for private gain’ (World Bank 2002) – and upon this definition now rests a whole raft of policies concerning transparency, liberalization and ‘good governance’. But this definition reduces corruption simply to a problem of dishonest individuals or ‘rotten apples’ working in the public sector. It also reduces explanations for corruption to individual greed and personal venality so that our focus – to extend the metaphor – is on the individual apples rather than the barrel that contains them. But what if corruption is institutional and systemic? Is the Catholic Church corrupt, or Cardinal Lay of Boston, who recently confessed to having turned a blind eye to reports of paedophilia within the clergy? Who is the corrupt party in the case of the Enron, Merck, Xerox and Andersen scandals? Is it the lowly official who shredded the incriminating documents, his line-manager who gave him the order, or the company executives who played fast and loose with the markets? And how do we measure ‘abuse of public office’ or ‘private gain’ (more on this later)? In France, prosecuting magistrates recently uncovered information indicating that successive presidents (from General de Gaulle onwards) used money from the state-owned oil company Elf-Aquitaine to bribe foreign leaders. President Mitterrand used these illegal funds to finance the election campaign of his German Christian Democrat ally, Chancellor Helmut Kohl. How do these activities square with the World Bank’s definition of corruption, and what are the implications of this apparent ‘lack of fit’?

THEORIZING CORRUPTION: SOCIAL SCIENCE PERSPECTIVES

Generally speaking, the social sciences have approached corruption from two broad perspectives: structural and interactional. Structural approaches, with their moral and evolutionary overtones, are more commonly found in development studies as well as popular media representations. These add ‘corruption’ to the list of those negative characteristics that are typically applied to the ‘Other’, such as underdevelopment, poverty, ignorance, repression of women, fundamentalism, fanaticism and irrationality. Naturally, these ‘Others’ are located outside modern, civilized, Western-style democracies, and they are intrinsically caught in the webs of ‘their’ culture. Corruption here is seen as endemic to some societies (i.e. ‘non-Western’ or, equally Eurocentric, ‘transitional’ or ‘developing’ societies), and not (or less) to others.

This stereotype inevitably recalls colonial discourse about the ‘primitiveness’ of ‘savage society’. But equally, it reflects more recent writings of those who, like Edward Banfield (1958), saw backwardness and underdevelopment as a product of the ‘moral’ basis of certain societies. Even in the 1970s corruption was commonly perceived as a social pathology symptomatic of Third World instability and lack of ‘social discipline’. On the other hand, many scholars of that period rejected this, arguing instead that corruption has a positive function in development because it ‘fills the gap’ left by partial bureaucratization and the incomplete penetration of the state. According to this logic, corruption eases the transition to modernity and is therefore, theoretically speaking, associated with the ‘early phase of state formation’ (Blok 1988: 228). It was also assumed that corruption would disappear with increasing state penetration and the advance of more ‘rational’ formal organizations. As Stephen Sampson wryly observes in his critique of Bayley (1966), Scott and other supporters of this type of argument: ‘corruption presumably encourages capital formation and entrepreneurship, diminishes red tape, mitigates ethnic or class conflicts, integrates pariah groups into society, and gives more people a stake in the system’ (Sampson 1983: 72).

A second structural approach, prevalent in the field of International Relations (IR), is directed more towards analysing the system of formal rules and institutions. Its aim is to determine how and why certain actors – particularly elites – are able to act for personal gain. IR scholars examine various factors, such as how ruling elites are composed, what sorts of competition exist among them, and how accountable they are. The result, as Postero (2000) observes, ‘is a set of correlations between certain factors and corruption, which form the basis for prescriptions against corruption’. Transparency International, whose ‘index’ attempts to quantify corruption across countries on an annual basis, also uses this approach. These measures are then used to promote ‘modern’ notions of governance, efficiency, accountability and transparency – which are seen as prerequisites for promoting international free trade. While advocates of this approach claim that the concept of ‘good governance’ is based on neutral, objective and a-cultural values, critics argue that it reinforces the hegemonic values of the West as universal – precisely by defining them as ‘above’ the realm of politics and culture. As has been noted elsewhere, this is a familiar tactic of normative power and part of the art of modern liberal government (see Foucault 1991).

In contrast to structural approaches, ‘interactional’ approaches focus on the behaviour of actors in particular public-office settings. Here corruption is defined as behaviour that deviates from the formal duties of a public role in favour of private or personal gain. Alternatively, corrupt behaviour is that which ‘harms the public-interest’ (Friedrich 1966; Heidenheimer 1989a, 1989b). This might include a corrupt civil servant who uses his office as a private business (see Van Klaveren 1989), or who creates an informal ‘black market’ for official favours and ‘rents’, for example, by helping certain clients to cut through the ‘red tape’ of bureaucracy in order to obtain the necessary permit or licence.

While these contrasting approaches may offer some useful insights, most are based on questionable assumptions and none are adequate for understanding the complexity of the relationships involved. For example, ‘misuse of public office’ begs the question of how we define ‘public’ or ‘private gain’ – or even ‘mis-use’? What happens when politicians (such as Italy’s premier, Silvio Berlusconi) change the law so that their previously ‘illegal’ practices of book-keeping are reclassified as legal? Furthermore, laws are notoriously ambiguous and open to contestation – a quality to which a whole professional class, that of lawyers, owes its existence. The definition of ‘the public interest’ (and who speaks for the public) is equally vague and contested – and precisely the terrain over which democratic politics are fought.

The problem with both structural and interactional models is that they assume these variables to be fixed and unproblematic, whereas these categories are not at all bounded or clear-cut. Take, for example, the public/private dualism. Most definitions of corruption rest on the separation between the state or its agents and the rest of society. As salaried public officials, politicians, bureaucrats and judges are expected to draw a sharp distinction between their personal interests and the public resources they administer. In the conventional political science approach, as in neoliberal ideology and in TI initiatives, it is the violation of this public/private distinction by individuals that fundamentally defines corrupt behaviour. Corruption scandals are thus viewed as a measure of how well a society distinguishes between public and private spheres (Rose-Ackerman 1996: 366). However, anthropologists have long recognized that this public–private dichotomy is often an arbitrary and inherently ambiguous cultural category. As Gupta’s analysis of state officials in northern India illustrates, Western assumptions about the rational activity of office-holders simply do not translate. The distinction between an official’s role as public servant and private citizen is collapsed not only at the site of their activity, but also in their styles of operation. ‘One has a better chance of finding them [the officials]’ says Gupta (1995: 384) ‘at the roadside tea stalls and in their homes than in their offices.’ As one contemporary Indian scholar explains, ‘the greatest weakness of our polity [is that] we enshrined in the constitution a value system which was never internalised, and which was external to the Indian ethos’ (Gill 1998: 230, cited in Parry 2000: 51).

The same argument could be made for many other countries. In post-Soviet Russia, for example, the growth of what Wedel (2001) calls ‘flex organisations’ (ambiguous organizations that can shift between public agencies and private NGOs), challenges the conventional tidy separation of state and private sector enterprises. But equally, closer analysis of the Enron affair reveals the extent to which a culture of clientelism, extortion and contempt for ordinary society and its rules characterized company practices in which favour-giving and complicity between senior Enron executives and officials in Wall Street and Washington were commonplace. As Schneider and Schneider (2003) point out, comparisons between corporate scandals and organized crime ‘raise the question whether organisational crime, extortion and illegal trafficking are not full-fledged elements of the workings of capitalism, as such’.

While public and private realms may be codified by rules in most Western democracies, there are invariably ‘grey zones’ between these domains. Officials will always have discretion and room for manoeuvre – they could not fulfil their duties otherwise. But this discretion allows for flexibility and particularism in the way clients are treated, which opens up the possibility for favouritism and cronyism and blurs any categorical public/private distinctions. For example, when German Minister Hans Eichel was accused in 2001 of using the ministerial jet to attend a ‘private’ party political rally in his constituency, he defended himself arguing that as minister with 24-hours a day duties, such public–private distinctions were inapplicable. Similarly, when former German Chancellor Helmut Kohl disclosed in 2000 that he had used secret funds to finance his Christian Democratic (CDU) party in the former GDR he insisted (drawing on the strategically useful IMF definition) that this was not ‘corruption’ as he had not made any private or personal gain. Does this mean that ‘private gain’ can only ever be defined in pecuniary terms, or that other factors – power, prestige, authority and symbolic capital – are to be discounted?

WHY AN ANTHROPOLOGY OF CORRUPTION?

Few anthropologists go into the field with the aim of studying corruption per se.⁶ In most cases, our interest in the subject arises because it matters to our informants and because of the prevalence of ‘corruption talk’ in the areas where we conduct fieldwork. As anthropologists working in contemporary India have observed, stories about corruption are told more often than almost any other genre of folklore, and as a topic of daily chah-shop conversation corruption beats even the state of the crops (Parry 2000; see also Wade 1982). Or as Sian Lazar (this volume) noted doing her fieldwork in Bolivia, ‘people just talked about corruption non-stop: corruption was how they made sense of politics and the state’. This is no less true of parts of Europe as it is for Latin America, as Jon Mitchell’s recent ethnography of Malta demonstrates (Mitchell 2002).

At one level then, corruption merits closer anthropological attention simply because of its inexplicable pervasiveness and the curious fascination that people, in almost every part of the world, seem to have with stories of corruption. In this sense corruption represents both an ethnographic enigma and a ‘social fact’ in the classical Durkheimian sense. Or perhaps what makes corruption such an interesting object of study is not so much the ‘reality’ of its existence as the fact that it is widely believed to exist, the complex narratives that enfold it, and the new relationships and objects of study that those narratives create. Visvanathan and Sethi (1998) give a vivid illustration of this in their ana...