Corruption: Anthropological Perspectives (Anthropology, Culture and Society)

262 Pages·2005·2.11 MB·English

by  Dieter Haller

CORRUPTION
Anthropological Perspectives
Edited by
DIETER HALLER AND CRIS SHORE
P
Pluto Press
LONDON (cid:127) ANN ARBOR, MI
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First published 2005 by Pluto Press
345 Archway Road, London N6 5AA
and 839 Greene Street,
Ann Arbor MI 48106, USA
www.plutobooks.com
Copyright © Dieter Haller and Cris Shore 2005
The right of the individual contributors to be identified
as the authors of this work has been asserted by them
in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 0 7453 2158 5 hardback
ISBN 0 7453 2157 7 paperback
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CONTENTS
1 Introduction – Sharp Practice: Anthropology and the
Study of Corruption 1
Cris Shore and Dieter Haller
Part I Corruption in ‘Transitional’ Societies?
2 The Sack of Two Cities: Organized Crime and Political
Corruption in Youngstown and Palermo 29
Jane Schneider and Peter Schneider
3 Bribes, Gifts and Unofficial Payments: Rethinking
Corruption in Post-Soviet Russian Health Care 47
Michele Rivkin-Fish
4 Corruption as a Transitional Phenomenon: Understanding
Endemic Corruption in Postcommunist States 65
David W. Lovell
5 Corruption, Property Restitution and Romanianness 83
Filippo M. Zerilli
Part II Institutionalized Corruption and Institutions of
Anti-corruption
6 Integrity Warriors: Global Morality and the
Anti-corruption Movement in the Balkans 103
Steven Sampson
7 Culture and Corruption in the EU: Reflections on Fraud,
Nepotism and Cronyism in the European Commission 131
Cris Shore
8. Corruption in Corporate America: Enron – Before and
After 156
Carol MacLennan
Part III Narratives and Practices of Everyday Corruption
9 Narrating the State of Corruption 173
Akhil Gupta
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vi Corruption
10 Where the Jeeps Come From: Narratives of Corruption
in the Alentejo (Southern Portugal) 194
Dorle Dracklé
11 Citizens Despite the State: Everyday Corruption and
Local Politics in El Alto, Bolivia 212
Sian Lazar
12 Afterword – Anthropology and Corruption: The State of
the Art 229
Dorothy Louise Zinn
Contributors 243
Index 247
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1 INTRODUCTION – SHARP PRACTICE:
ANTHROPOLOGY AND THE STUDY
OF CORRUPTION1
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
1
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2 Corruption
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
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Introduction 3
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 refl ects more recent
writings of those who, like Edward Banfi eld (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 ‘fi lls 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
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4 Corruption
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 confl icts, integrates pariah groups
into society, and gives more people a stake in the system’ (Sampson
1983: 72).
A second structural approach, prevalent in the fi eld 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, effi ciency,
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 defi ning
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-offi ce 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 offi ce as a private business
(see Van Klaveren 1989), or who creates an informal ‘black market’
for offi cial 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
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Introduction 5
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’.
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6 Corruption
While public and private realms may be codifi ed by rules in most
Western democracies, there are invariably ‘grey zones’ between
these domains. Offi cials will always have discretion and room for
manoeuvre – they could not fulfi l their duties otherwise. But this
discretion allows for fl exibility 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 fi nance his
Christian Democratic (CDU) party in the former GDR he insisted
(drawing on the strategically useful IMF defi nition) 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 defi ned 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
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