Rule of Law?

If the relevance of research in ….political science is understood as how it may improve human well-being and/or political legitimacy, research has to a large extent been focusing on the least important part of the political system, namely, how ‘access to power’ is organized (i.e. electoral and representative democracy and processes of democratization).

This focus on elections, democratization processes and party systems ignores what we consider to be the more important part of the state machinery for increasing human well-being, namely, how power is exercised or, in other words, the quality of how the state manages to govern society

(Bo Rothstein 2011).

In the autumn of 1990, I made a fateful trip across the North Sea to take up a short-term assignment in Copenhagen with the World Health Organisation to help its Head of Public Health map out strategic options for what were then regarded as “the newly independent states” of central and eastern Europe. The difficulties these countries faced in their “transition” to a “better” state were soon reflected in the literature of “transitology”, “democratization” and of “capacity development”.

One of the many fields into which my new line of work took me was that of “corruption” – which the academics made typically complex by designating it, variously, “particularism”, clientilism or “patrimonialism”. Bo Rothstein is one of the best analysts in the field and explains in the linked article that the very word wasn’t acceptable until the early 1990s – after which it became essentially a stick with which to beat nations judged to be inferior.

The European Union and Commission bear a particular responsibility for first pushing privatization on the countries seeking membership of the Union; and then corrupting their new institutions with tens of billions of European Regional Funding.

This may initially have had the elites licking their lips – but the scale of the bureaucracy required to access the goodies and the subsequent monitoring and fraud investigations has now made this a much less attractive proposition. The use of these funds were recently analysed in painstaking detail in "Europe's Burden - promoting good governance across. borders" by Alina Mungiu-Pippidi (2019)

Of course, “it takes two to tango” – and I’m not disputing the need for effective anti-corruption strategies - but there is too much rhetoric and lip-service evident in the way this work is carried out. The sources of the wealth which seduces and corrupts are Western – those who are presented with the opportunities are Bulgarian, Czechs, Greeks, Hungarian, Italian, Polish, Romanian and Slovaks. 

And the corruption is not just systemic but moral and, thanks to the European Union, has seeped into the very bloodstream of society. The average monthly pension and wage in Bulgaria and Romania is just over 300 euros but their judges, generals and MEPs earn 10,000 euros with a cascading effect on senior salaries.

Is it any wonder that the result is totally alienated societies???