Corruption in Southeastern Europe and Latin America. An Introduction

When looking at developments in Southeastern Europe, the European Union (EU) usually treats corruption as one of the region’s most basic problems, as important as ethnic conflict and seemingly more important than economic development. Corruption indeed figures prominently within Southeastern Europe, where corruption scandals usually make up a large part of political reporting, so that the public is left with the impression that neither the ruling elites nor the institutions in the individual countries are to be trusted.

As a result, in every country in Southeastern Europe rapprochement with the EU has been accompanied by the introduction of anti-corruption laws and agencies, although their effects have disappointed many. That is especially true for political corruption which has proved to be hard to tackle by schematic introduction of laws, rules, and regulations. While it is clear that certain types of everyday corruption have been contained significantly—such as that involving traffic police—abuses of power can be curbed only if there is some counterforce backed not only by the political will but also with the power and capability to fight corruption. Most Southeast European societies were modernized from above, with their citizens included into state affairs in a manner that was in many cases clientelistic. As a result, corruption control by civil society actors could emerge only with difficulty, although it does seems today that anti-corruption is developing successfully, at least in certain countries in the region.

In saying that, we must keep in mind that corruption is a highly problematic concept. Journalists usually proceed from one of the well-known definitions of it laid down by Transparency International or the World Bank, but scholars have yet to arrive at a common understanding of corruption.^[1] While jurists or economists tend to develop an ‘objective’ understanding and label as corruption all violations of written rules carried out for personal gain, anthropologists or historians are more cautious and tend to suppose that a society might have unwritten rules which themselves constitute a value system. To refer to anything as corruption from an outsider’s perspective might then be problematic, especially if a particular society ascribes another meaning to it. That latter approach tends to think of ‘informality’, which sounds less pejorative than ‘corruption’. To the ancient Romans their Latin word corruptio denoted transition from the perfect to a spoiled condition, but today most understand ‘corruption’ in a narrower sense as the misuse of public office for private gain. Nevertheless, the sense of ‘spoiling’ has never left the word.

Another problem is that allegations of corruption usually produce scandals and so create an image of a community or its elite; on the other hand, corruption is rarely directly measurable and always difficult to prove. Corruption discourses can deeply shake faith in government and institutions, and those who scandalize corruption usually pretend to know exactly what large-scale abuse is going on. However, if cases of corruption do come before the courts many of them end in acquittal because corruption, being a usually hidden practice, leaves little or no trace suitable for submission as legal evidence. Even if such acquittals are the correct outcomes of properly followed legal process, the public are often left with the impression that the judiciary too have fallen victim to illicit influence. Corruption discourses are therefore deeply ambivalent. On the one hand they might enhance public sensitivity to abuses of office and through it lead to new arrangements which might curb corruption effectively. On the other hand they might destroy any remaining faith in public institutions, which would open the way to populism and—paradoxically—subsequent strong waves of patronage. Such patronage tends to be produced by the sort of authoritarian regimes which emerge with the help of corruption allegations against their predecessors in power. When it comes to suspicions of corruption in Southeastern Europe, one side usually claims that the other is corrupt; the common riposte of the accused is that the allegations themselves are false and motivated by political interest. Meanwhile, the public receive the impression that ‘everyone up there’ is corrupt and that the sensible thing is for ordinary citizens to turn their backs on politics in general. Only for as long as there is hope that anti-corruption protests might change something can corruption discourses have a vitalizing effect on democratic participation.

For this thematic issue of Südosteuropa we have gathered some of the contributions to the IOS Annual Conference which took place in Regensburg from 29 June to 1 July 2017 under the title ‘Corruption in Eastern/Southeastern Europe and Latin America: Comparative Perspectives’. The comparison with Latin America stems from our conviction that area studies cannot develop well if they perceive ‘their’ regions as closed worlds with neither connections to the outside nor comparability with it. In our case, our interest in comparison was stronger than our interest in entanglements, for while the latter do exist they are probably of lesser importance in the matter of corruption. My initial idea as editor of this issue of bringing together scholars working on Eastern/Southeastern Europe and Latin America in fact came to me from personal experience. My father’s family is of ‘Mexican German’ origin, in that my parental grandparents’ ancestors emigrated to Mexico in the 19^th century and went into business there. Even on my first visit to Mexico in 1982 I can recall that members of the Mexican branch of my family complained of political corruption, which in their view went a long way towards explaining how things in Mexico were developing. When during the 1990s I became interested in the societies of Eastern and Southeastern Europe, corruption similarly appeared as the general explanation for many of the region’s problems, from poverty to matters of security. However, far from simply accepting such interpretations at face value I began to wonder how it was that in regions so very different and so internally differentiated as Southeastern Europe and Latin America, the matter of corruption could become so central to world view of people like my family. Was it a global discourse that led them to their interpretations? Had they experienced similar practices themselves, or were they in fact referring to different things when they complained about corruption? Were there common factors, such as long imperial rule perhaps, that produce similar outcomes or were similar outcomes produced by different sets of practices? In my efforts at comparison I did not have it in mind that both regions were ‘equally corrupt’; rather I was interested in differences as well as commonalities in the creation of the sort of public mistrust which figures quite prominently in both regions.

As expected, for this issue of Südosteuropa we found few scholars willing to engage in direct comparisons between Latin America and Southeastern Europe. To begin with however, for our first section dealing with corruption as discourse we were extremely fortunate to win over Blendi Kajsiu, who is one of the few exceptions to the rule. A political scientist from Albania working at the University of Medellín in Colombia, Kajsiu compares the discourses of the prime minister of Albania Edi Rama and president Juan Manuel Santos of Colombia. Kajsiu comes to interesting conclusions, finding that while the prime minister Rama of Albania sees the state apparatus as the main stumbling block and businesses, both domestic and international as some of the main victims of corruption, president Santos of Colombia has a much broader view of the problem. President Santos sees the problems of corruption as including and affecting general morality and the injustices of globalisation, as well as in rigged elections or the behaviour of business people. The tendency to see corruption in Albania as a deficiency in state performance but in Colombia as a matter rather of general fairness seems to me to reflect not only the particular views of Rama and Santos but also the legacies of different state building processes in each area. In Latin America for example, social matters have long been at the centre of political discourse and that is naturally reflected in Santos’ views; meanwhile in the Balkans matters of social justice have often been subsumed in national and ethnic questions. Divided into competing nations, the Balkans during their EU integration process are more prone simply to ‘buy into’ Western neoliberal concepts while blaming their own state apparatus, rather than developing broader ‘postcolonial’ concepts of corruption.

As an example of a law prohibiting vote-buying in Brazil, Andrea Reis do Carmo shows us some of the ingredients necessary for successful mobilization against corruption. In the 1990s Brazilian democracy had just emerged from two decades of dictatorship and, all but consolidated, it suffered from extreme levels of social inequality. For political parties therefore, simply buying votes from the poor was about to become a viable way of securing their support. Thanks to outstanding actors especially from the traditionally social-minded and ‘left-leaning’ Catholic clergy, an initiative was set up to collect signatures for a legal ban on vote-buying. Central to the victory, which culminated in a law enacted in 2000, was not only the clear and principled commitment of those individual actors, but also the fact that the campaign was supported by the Catholic Church itself, which lent its capillary structures in Brazilian society to the campaign. In a way, do Carmo’s story reminds us of the role of the Catholic Church in toppling communist rule in Poland, for there too pressure from civil society was helped by a church which lent its powerful organization to a matter that lay outside questions of narrow theology.

The next section turns away from discourses on general corruption to examine the micro-level. In contrast to their views of political or ‘grand’ corruption, many societies do not so harshly condemn everyday or ‘petty corruption’, since it is often seen as an understandable coping strategy for ordinary people. One consequence is that petty corruption is experienced by many, is less hidden, and is easier to observe empirically. The two papers in this section are dedicated to informal extra payments in the healthcare systems of Hungary and Serbia, and are based largely on fieldwork interviews. Those who deliver the payments are patients who expect better treatment in exchange, or who perhaps wish to express gratitude. For her inquiry on hálapénz (gratitude money) payments in Hungary, Petra Burai interviewed elderly ladies in small towns in the east of the country. Burai shows on the one hand that for those paying it hálapénz has nothing to do with our common understanding of corruption, according to which we should have to interpret the existence of hálapénz as proof of immoral greed among doctors. On the contrary, many interviewees consider hálapénz simply a matter of good taste; it is no more than a way of evaluating a doctor’s performance and then expressing gratitude for it. Burai stresses that on the other hand hálapénz is problematic too, since not all concerned share a belief in its principal legitimacy. Besides that, informal institutions like hálapénz come with their own unwritten rules which are not always respected, so that sometimes patients are left with the impression that a greedy doctor took more than a fair share. Contemporary Hungarian law, though still uncertain on the subject, shows a tendency to treat hálapénz more critically than in the 1990s.

While hálapénz is a phenomenon with roots in the traditional gift economy, the practices examined by Ljiljana Pantović are clearly a product of postsocialism. Pantović has accompanied women looking for good-quality maternal care in Novi Sad, and she has interviewed the doctors working with them. After the fall of socialism hospital doctors tried to enhance their incomes by opening additional private practices to deliver preparatory medical services to pregnant women. Those services are not covered by the health insurance system, which pays only for treatment in hospital. From the state’s point of view private practices are petty enterprises without status within the official medical system. Since women perceive state-run maternity wards as rather cold and harsh institutions lacking freedom and basic privacy, they try to provide for themselves a more pleasant experience of giving birth by establishing prior contact with the private practice of the hospital doctor concerned. They will see the doctor to arrange their prenatal care thereby ‘buying themselves a connection’ in a particular hospital. For such women it amounts to an attempt to mitigate the deficiencies of the state medical system, while for doctors it is both a way of augmenting their low incomes from state clinics and a way of bolstering their status and patients’ faith in them. While true status is gained only through work in the ‘official’ maternity ward system, the sense of trust between physician and patient is established in previous contact through private practices. While that reality clearly indicates weaknesses in Serbia’s legal framework, its insurance system and its overall medical policies (to say nothing of the actual hospitals), the solutions applied by such women cannot easily be called ‘corruption’.

The final section covers the dilemmas of anti-corruption and makes clear that we are still far from consensus on how to fight corruption. Alexandra Iancu’s contribution on Romania shows that even in a country where anti-corruption has been comparatively successful over recent years, society is in deadlock over how to proceed. Since the 1990s the Romanian parliament has been in discussion about the criteria for suspending parliamentary immunity for members of parliament (MPs) charged with corruption. Before EU accession all political parties favoured straightforward processes to do that, since anti-corruption was top of the agenda for the EU and accession candidates alike, with broad consensus that MPs showed a tendency to misuse their parliamentary immunity to evade punishment for transgressions. Dissenting views appeared only when Romania acquired EU membership in 2007, and then critics of anti-corruption argued that the mandate of the country’s anti-corruption agency (the National Anticorruption Directorate, Direcția Națională Anticorupție, DNA) went too far. Opponents stated that the DNA tended to undermine elected legislation in favour of a body created not by the will of the Romanian people but by that of the EU. Besides that, the DNA was reproached for its ties with the secret service. Iancu’s analysis stops in 2016 but is very helpful to those wishing to understand the current situation in Romania, where the ruling social democrats have recently managed to water down anti-corruption legislation.

Finally, Alena Ledeneva—one of our keynote speakers at the conference—makes us aware of how far we still are both from understanding corruption and from being able to devise intelligent anti-corruption measures. With our heads full of dogma and age-old dichotomies we are frequently unable to grasp what corruption means to ‘corrupt’ actors in a particular context, failing to understand how it relates either to their calculations or to their moral values. International anti-corruption agendas tend to use western models as the norm, but such models cannot be easily applied to other contexts. That inherent deficiency has caused the failure of many anti-corruption activities which concentrated on attempting to import wholesale anti-corruption laws and institutions which turned out to be inappropriate. The question then is: How can we manage to curb ‘corruption’ if it is not considered corruption by locals but functions as a key link between politics and people? And what if international anti-corruption and local understanding of justice simply do not overlap? From that point of view it seems quite clear which direction research should take in the future; it should delve into specific local understandings of justice to see how anti-corruption could address grievances.