Other societies and their cultures are strange – so we invent stories to help us understand their behavior. Thus the French are argumentative and the Germans methodical…Some people indeed have made careers from explaining local behaviour to visitors eg Geert de Hodstede, Richard Lewis and Frans Trompenaars. Add in some scandal and wrongdoing, and you soon have a full-scale industry – namely that of anti-corruption. This post is my attempt as an outsider to offer an overview of that literature of the past 30 years.….
When, in the late 1990s, I first noticed this development, my judgement was that the “best practice” being offered was very much what the sociologists, rather euphemistically, call “an ideal type” ie a version of reality one rarely finds in practice. This is what I wrote at the time –
A lot of what the global
community preaches as “good practice” in government structures is actually of
very recent vintage in their own countries and is still often more rhetoric
than actual practice.
Of
course public appointments, for example, should be made on merit – and not on
the basis of family, ethnic or religious networks. But civil service
appointments and structures in Belgium and Netherlands, to name
but two European examples, were – until very recently – influenced by religious
and party considerations. In those cases a system which is otherwise rule-based
and transparent has had minor adjustments made to take account of strong social
realities and ensure consensus.
But
in the case of countries such as Northern Ireland (until recently) the
form and rhetoric of objective administration in the public good had been
completely undermined by religious divisions. All public goods (eg housing and
appointments) were, until the end of the 20th century, made in
favour of Protestants.
The Italian system has for decades been
notorious for the systemic abuse of the machinery of the state by various
powerful groups – with eventually the Mafia itself clearly controlling some key
parts of it. American influence played a powerful part in sustaining this in
the post-war period – but the collapse of communism removed that influence and
has allowed the Italians to have a serious attempt at reforming the system. At
least for a few years – before Berlusconi scuppered it all
These are well-known cases
– but the more we look, the more we find that countries which have long boasted
of their fair and objective public administration systems have in fact suffered
serious intrusions by sectional interests.
The
British and French indeed have invented words to describe the informal systems
which perverted the apparent neutrality and openness of their public
administration – the “old boy network” which was still the basis of the senior
civil service in Britain in the 1960s and 1970s a century after the first major
reform. And the elitist and closed nature of the French
ENArque system has, in the new millennium, become the subject of heated
debate in that country.
In many countries, local government appointments systems were, until very recently, strongly politicised - and it is clear that national european systems are becoming more politicised. This trend was started by Margaret Thatcher who simply did not trust the senior civil service to do what she needed. She brought in individuals who had proved their worth in the private sector and came into government service for a limited period of time (sometimes part-time and unpaid) to do a specific task which the Minister or Prime Minister judged the civil servants to be incapable of doing.
Her critique of the UK
Civil Service was twofold – first that those at the top were so balanced and
objective in their advice that they lacked the appetite to help lead and
implement the changes she considered British society needed; and second that
those further down the ladder lacked the management skills necessary to manage
public services. The Labour Government since 1997 inherited a civil service
they considered somewhat contaminated by 18 years of such dominant political
government – and had more than 200 such political appointees. Such trends are
very worrying for the civil service which has lost the influence and
constraining force they once had.
Conclusion; Too much of the commentary of international bodies on transition countries seems oblivious to this history and these realities – and imagines that a mixture of persuasive rhetoric and arm-twisting can lead to relevant, rapid and significant changes. A bit more humility is needed – and more thought about the realistic trajectory of change. To recognize this is not, however, to condone a system of recruitment by connections – “people we know”. Celebration of cultural differences can sometimes be used to legitimize practices which undermine social coherence and organizational effectiveness. And the acid test of a State body is whether the public thinks they are getting good public services delivered in an acceptable way!
The two decades since then have seen national reputations for integrity challenged – the British judicial system, for example, took a battering after a series of revelations of judicial cockups and its policing has always been suspect. But it was 2015 before a book with the title ”How Corrupt is Britain?” Ed by D Whyte appeared – followed a few years later by “Democracy for Sale - dark money and dirty politics”; by Peter Geoghegan (2020).
A later post will pursue this post-modernist disenchantment with the western institutions of which we used to be so proud.
For the moment, it's the situation in the new member states I want to focus on. Ralf Dahrendorf was probably the first to suggest (in 1990) that it would take the newly independent states of central and eastern Europe at least two generations to develop full Rule of Law and a properly functioning civil society. I vividly remember in the mid-1990s the EU’s first Ambassador to Romania (Karen Fogg) giving every visiting consultant such as me a copy of a review of Robert Putnam’s “Making Democracy Work” which contrasted northern and southern Italy and suggested that the latter’s emphasis on family connections put it several centuries behind the north (This little article in the current copy of NLR would suggest that was an overoptimistic interpretation of the North!). This is the same Robert Putnam who coined the concept of “social capital” which was taken up with great enthusiasm for a decade or so by the World Bank and academics but is critically assessed here. Although Robert Putnam gets the credit for making the idea of “social capital” or “trust” a central one in the mid 1990s, it was Francis Fukuyama who, for me, wrote the most interesting book on the subject – namely "Trust and the creation of prosperity” (1995)
Putnam’s book was based on an earlier work by an older American political scientist – Edward Banfield – who had, with his Italian wife, spent two years in the mid 1950s in a small Italian village in the south and subsequently produced a famous book “The Moral Basis of a Backward Society” (1958) which fixed the peculiarities of Italian society in the popular mind – until the Godfather films came along. “The never-ending debate about the moral basis of a backward society” is an excellent 2009 article by Emiliane Ferragina which explored the influence of the books.
The first wave of enthusiasm, in global bodies and academia alike, for anti-corruption (or “good governance” as it was more diplomatically called) strategies ended in the new millennium – when a note of realism became evident. It was at that stage that I realized that some of the best analyses were coming from the anthropologists
Further Reading
Shifting obsessions – 3 essays on the
politics of anti-corruption Ivan Krastev (2004) Bulgarian
political scientist exposes the hypocrisy behind the rhetoric
Syndromes of corruption – wealth,power and democracy Michael Johnson (2005) An American political scientist
who has been involved with the Transparency International work does good comparative
work here
Corruption – anthropological perspectives edited by D Haller and C
Shore (2005) quite excellent collection of case studies
Confronting Corruption, building
accountability – lessons from the world of international development advising
L Dumas, J Wedel and G Callman (2010)
Unaccountable – how anti-corruption
watchdogs and lobbyists sabotaged america’s finance, freedom and security ;
J Wedel (2016) another anthropologist
Making Sense of Corruption; Bo Rothstein (2017) one of the clearest expositions – this time by a Scandinavian political scientist
comment from Patrick Cockburn on the corruption of the British political class
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