The Ideological Malleability of Corruption. A Comparative Analysis of Official Corruption Discourses in Albania and Colombia, 2010-2017

Introduction

There is an implicit recognition in the corruption literature that the definition of corruption is ideological insofar as corruption implies deterioration from an ideal political condition. As Mark Philp has pointed out, the reason why there has been no consensus on the definition of political corruption is due to the fact that ‘the concept is rooted in ways of thinking about politics—that is, of there being some ‘naturally sound condition’ (variously described) from which corrupt acts deviate.’^[1] In other words, the way one defines corruption implicitly reflects the ideal political condition that one holds dear. For example, Mark Warren defined corruption as ‘duplicitous exclusion’ since ‘[i]deally, democracy requires that every individual potentially affected by a collective decision should have an opportunity to affect the decision, proportionally to his or her stake in the outcome’.^[2] For Marxist authors such as Stefan Sullivan, on the other hand, corruption expressed the inherent contradiction between the egalitarian necessity of democracy and the inherent tendency of capitalism to produce inequality, which is why it was defined as ‘the vulnerability of states to market forces, to the power of capital, to the influence of wealthy voters and interest groups’.^[3]

Yet little attention has been paid to this aspect of corruption in the literature. While the majority of corruption literature has focused on the causes, the consequences and the eradication of corruption, fewer authors have analysed the way corruption discourses reflect specific ideological perspectives. A number of authors have shown how anti-corruption discourses reflected and legitimised a neoliberal order.^[4] While interesting, such analyses fail to explain the multiplicity of articulations of corruption within the broader neoliberal hegemony. This is why it is important to compare and contrast articulations of corruption by political actors in countries with similar levels of corruption in order to show how their ideological positions shape their articulation of this phenomenon.

Hence this paper compares official discourses in two countries, namely Albania and Colombia, which according to most international measures and observers suffer from similar high levels of corruption. This paper shows that despite similar levels of corruption the leaders of the two countries articulate corruption in slightly different ways. While the prime minster of Albania Edi Rama articulates corruption narrowly as bribery, a phenomenon that pertains almost exclusively to the public sector, president Juan Manuel Santos of Colombia articulates it more broadly as a phenomenon that has moral, ethical and cultural dimensions, which can also originate in the private sector, although it is far more present in the public one. I argue that such different articulations reflect ideological differences between the two leaders more than different corruption ‘realities’ on the ground. The articulation of corruption by president Santos as a phenomenon that is present both in the public and the private sector, although more in the former than in the latter, is a reflection of his Third Way ideology that while prioritising the market does recognise its limits and the need for state intervention. Prime minister Rama’s articulation of corruption as primarily a public sector phenomenon, on the other hand, reflects his neoliberal ideology that sees the private sector as the engine of development and the state as a potential hindrance.

Although the neoliberal ideology is clearly dominant in both countries, different historical contexts have produced varying versions of such dominant ideology in each of them. In the case of Colombia the dominant Third Way ideology that Colombian president Juan Manuel Santos (2010-2018) articulated should be understood within the broader Latin American context where various social and political movements have strongly resisted the neoliberal project.^[5] While in the case of Colombia such resistance has been weaker than in the neighbouring countries (e.g. Bolivia, Ecuador and Venezuela) it has nevertheless been significant.^[6] As a consequence, political elites in Colombia moderated their neoliberal ideology—even while implementing it—by at times criticising the market and recognising the importance of state intervention when necessary, or by paying lip-service to left-wing concepts such as social justice. In the case of Eastern Europe, on the other hand, resistance to the neoliberal project has been much weaker, especially at the elite level.^[7] As some authors have argued when faced with neoliberal reforms in the 1990s, Eastern European societies were far more patient than ‘the rebellious Latin American countries’.^[8] This was particularly the case in Albania, where a traumatic communist past could be easily utilised by local and international elites to legitimise a fundamentalist neoliberal ideology that saw the market as the new salvation.^[9]

In order to prove the above argument, this paper has been organised in three main parts. In the first, I develop a theoretical and methodological framework that analyses corruption from a discourse analysis perspective, building on the insights of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe. In the second, I compare qualitatively and quantitatively those speeches of Albanian prime minister Edi Rama and Colombian president Juan Manuel Santos that focus on, or mention, corruption, as well as their anti-corruption strategies and policies. In the third and final part, I account for the different articulations of corruption by emphasising the different ideological contexts within which they have taken place.

A Theoretical and Methodological Framework. A Discourse Analysis of Corruption

Following Laclau and Mouffe, discourse is understood as a symbolic order that ‘includes within itself the linguistic and the nonlinguistic’.^[10] Hence, all objects are constituted as objects of discourse. In the case of corruption this means that instead of looking for an essence of this phenomenon, the different signifieds will be traced that were attached to the signifier corruption in the Albanian and Colombian contexts. Here, the analytical distinction will be followed made by Ferdinand de Saussure between the signifier and the signified, where the signifier is the sound-image, whereas the signified is the concept that the signifier stands for.^[11] By looking at corruption as a signifier, focus can be placed on the different signifieds (i.e. meanings, contents, concepts) that the signifier corruption has stood for in different contexts. This means that instead of trying to identify a common denominator, a minimal remainder, or a common essence of different signifieds that come under the signifier ‘corruption’, the aim here is to explore how the signifier ‘corruption’ connects with different signifieds in the Albanian and Colombian official corruption discourses.

To understand this process, the concept of ‘floating signifier’ will be utilised, which was developed by Laclau and Mouffe and consists of ‘the sliding of the signified under the signifier’.^[12] More specifically, a floating signifier is a ‘signifier that is overflowed with meaning because it is articulated differently within different discourses’.^[13] The signifier corruption has been attached to a number of different signifieds in different paradigms within political science. Thus, under the modernisation paradigm, corruption was seen as a consequence of a lack of modernisation and it was connected to bribery, misappropriation of public funds, nepotism, patronage and clientelism as ‘behavior which deviates from the duties of a public role because of private regarding (personal, close family, private clique) pecuniary or status gain’.^[14] In the economic paradigm, corruption was connected to a lack of competition such as rent-seeking, or as the betrayal of a principal`s interest by an agent.^[15] In the political paradigm, on the other hand, corruption has been connected to ‘unjustifiable disempowerment’^[16] as well as to unjust patterns of economic and political participation, and to the incompatibility of ‘economic and political systems, which is most acute in terms of the competing imperatives of capitalism and democracy’ (see Table 1).^[17]

As Table 1 shows, the signifier corruption has been attached to different signifieds in different discourses within political science. What Table 1 however does not show, is that corruption discourses are ideologically laden. They entail efforts to legitimise or neutralise specific social or political orders. This means that they will produce conceptions of corruption that not only reflect their ideological tendency but also tend to reinforce or reproduce them. Thus, the modernisation literature on corruption implied that the ‘state apparatuses of Western Europe and the US allegedly operate[ed] according to rational procedures and universalistic principles in which there [was] no place for personalism, cronyism and, most of all the confusion of the private and public interests.’^[18] Within the economic paradigm, on the other hand, public choice accounts of corruption ‘favor[ed] a shift from politics to the market so as to make fewer demands on self-restraint’.^[19] In this way most accounts of corruption within the economic paradigm have served to legitimise a neoliberal ideology of privatisation and marketisation. Finally, within the political paradigm different articulations of corruption reflect different ideological positions. Thus, for Marxist authors such as Stefan Sullivan, corruption referred to the ‘vulnerability of states to market forces, to the power of capital, to the influence of wealthy voters and interest groups’.^[20]

In order to avoid the above pitfalls, it is important to approach corruption from an anti-essentialist discourse analysis perspective that does not fall into any of the above three paradigms. Instead of trying to identify what corruption is, it is important to explore why corruption is defined or understood in a certain way. The aim here is to explain the articulation of corruption in terms of the function it performs within a political regime. To do so, one needs to approach corruption as a discursive construction whose definition constantly changes depending on the political ideals or the political agenda of those who articulate it. Approaching corruption as a discursive construction enables one to understand how and why it can be used to legitimise a given political agenda. As such, a discursive analysis of corruption allows the avoidance of the pitfall of conforming to a given political ideal under the guise of corruption analysis.

Official Discourses of Corruption in Albania and Colombia, 2010-2017

There are three key differences in the articulation of corruption between Santos and Rama that pertain to its location, the type of victimisation it produces and its definition. In Rama’s discourse, corruption is located primarily within the public sector in general and the state in particular, while it seems quite absent from the private sector. In Santos’ discourse on the other hand, corruption can be found both in the private and the public sector, as well as in the interaction between the two. This leads to a second difference; the victimisation that corruption produces. While in Rama’s discourse the state is the principal perpetrator of corruption and the private companies and citizens its primary victims; Santos also articulates corruption as perpetrated by private and social actors against the state. Finally, corruption is defined quite narrowly in Rama’s discourse and more widely in that of Santos. While for Rama corruption is primarily defined as bribery, for Santos corruption is more than an economic transaction; it has a moral, ethical, cultural and social dimension as well.

Accounting for the Differences. The Ideological Function of Corruption

It is important to eliminate three tempting explanations as to why official corruption discourses in Albania and Colombia differ. First, one could reasonably argue that if Rama focused on bribery and public sector corruption more than Santos, it was because public sector corruption in Albania was perceived to be higher than in Colombia. Second, one could argue that public sector corruption was actually higher in Albania than Colombia. Finally, one could argue that different articulations of corruption responded to different anti-corruption contexts. While anti-corruption had been a priority of the Albanian government since 1998, in Colombia this issue had been overshadowed by the armed conflict. It was only after the signing of the peace agreement with the FARC in 2016 that Santos’ government began to focus on anti-corruption as a key priority. Hence, the fact that Santos’ discourses focused on a broader range of issues with regard to corruption could be understood as a reflection of the fact that Colombia’s anti-corruption was a more recent phenomenon that still had to develop the legal framework, which Albanian anti-corruption practice already had established.

While both explanations are reasonable they are not born out of the facts. First, there seems to be no mayor difference with regard to corruption perceptions regarding the public sector in either of the countries. As Table 5 demonstrates, perceptions of public sector corruption were quite similar in the two countries. Indeed, in 2013 public sector corruption was a slightly greater concern for Colombians than for Albanians. At the same time, survey data showed that private corruption issues such as state capture were not more salient among the Colombian electorate compared to the Albanian one. Quite to the contrary, more Albanians seemed to think that their government was run by a few large entities acting in their own interests (see Table 6). One cannot conclude therefore, that the official corruption discourses differ because they reflect different corruption preoccupations in the two countries. The same holds true as far as other indices of public sector corruption are utilised. The most famous of such

indices, the Corruption Perception Index (CPI) by Transparency International, could be utilised as a proxy for measuring levels of public sector corruption (see Table 7). As Table 7 shows, there is a very little difference between Albania and Colombia as far as the CPI is concerned. Although it is very difficult to measure actual levels of corruption in the public sector, another possible proxy estimation could be the level of bribery in the public sector. As Table 8 shows, although levels of bribery appear to be slightly higher in the Albanian public sector, there is very little difference between the two countries. The same holds true regarding anti-corruption legislation. While Albania began its anti-corruption crusades earlier, the Global Integrity Index showed that Colombia’s anti-corruption legislative framework in 2011 was more comprehensive than that of Albania in 2010.^[69] In other words, one could not argue that the difference in corruption discourses can be explained due to the different anti-corruption stages of the two countries.

What explains the differences in the two discourses is not some ‘corruption reality’ on the ground, but the dominant neoliberal ideological context within which corruption was articulated. Here, neoliberal ideology is understood as a discourse that views the market as the primary engine of development and advocates open markets and free trade, while seeking to ‘adopt the free market as an organizing and regulating principle of the state’.^[70] Hence, the term neoliberal is used to identify a range of governmental projects aiming ‘to corporatize or privatize public sector institutions, to expand the sphere of competition and market like interaction’.^[71] Both countries have been transformed and penetrated by such a neoliberal ideology, albeit to different extents. The neoliberal order began to shape Colombian governance as early as the late 1970s.^[72] In Albania a similar process began in earnest from 1992, after the fall of communism.^[73]

Although the neoliberal ideology is dominant in both countries, it has different nuances in each case. The neoliberal ideology in Albania glorifies the market as the ultimate solution to all socio-political problems, without recognising any possible market failures. In the Colombian case the neoliberal ideology is ‘softer’ insofar as it is interpreted in the Third Way ideology. Of course, the Third Way ideology can be best described in the words of Perry Anderson as ‘the ideological shell of neoliberalism’.^[74] Under this ideology, the New Labour in Britain ‘embraced the market with a passion and enthusiasm which often [left] the Conservatives standing.’^[75] However, the Third Way, at least pays lip-service to left-wing concepts such as social justice, while recognising some limits to the market and some benefits to state intervention. In this sense it is ‘softer’ than the neoliberalism of the Chicago School that always views market failures as better than any failure caused by the very state intervention that sets out to correct them. It is this latter kind of neoliberal fundamentalism that is dominant in Albania today.

The difference between the two countries is that while in Colombia there has been resistance to the dominant neoliberal ideology, in Albania such resistance has been almost completely absent, at least within the main political parties. In the Colombian case, there are important parties on the left, such as El Polo Democratico Alternativo that forcefully condemn and resist neoliberalism and globalisation:

‘We [El Polo Democratico Alternativo] defend the sovereignty and independence of our nation against the United States and any other foreign centre of power. We reject the neoliberal globalisation and its instruments, Free Trade Treaties (FTT), as well as the impositions of big financial capital and its international institutions of control, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the World Trade Organization.’^[76]

Even right-wing politicians such as Alvaro Uribe who have been instrumental in the implementation of a neoliberal order in Colombia have had to pay lipservice to the criticism of neoliberalism. In his 2002 electoral manifesto Uribe, President of Colombia from 2002 to 2010, declared that the ‘[n]eoliberal model abandoned the social at the mercy of the market, which increased social misery and injustice’.^[77] To this end, Uribe proposed the Communitarian State as an alternative between the populist left and the neoliberal right. In a similar fashion Santos, who succeeded Uribe in 2010, embraced the Third Way as the alternative to socialism and neoliberalism.^[78]

This is not to say that there is a dominant left-wing ideology in Colombia. In fact, Colombia is one of the most right-wing countries in Latin America.^[79] There is, nevertheless, a willingness within the dominant neoliberal ideology of Colombia to recognise the limits of the market and the necessity of state intervention. Such willingness is in part a reflection of the resistance to the neoliberal model from various political and civil society sectors in Colombia. This in turn is reflected by the fact that there are clear ideological and policy differences between left- and right-spectrum political parties in Colombia, that is between the Democratic Pole (El Polo Democratico) on the left and the liberal and conservative parties on the right, as well as between the conservative and the centre democratic party, which is still further to the right.^[80]

Hence, Santos’ discourse on corruption is shaped by his Third Way ideology, meaning that his government is

‘friends to the private enterprises, to free trade […] We believe in the benefits of foreign investment and we protect it, so much so that the World Bank ranks us as the country that is most friendly to investors in Latin America’.^[81]

It is an ideology that while prioritising the market also incorporates criticisms of the neoliberal project, recognising the limits of the market and the need for state intervention when necessary. It ‘seeks to allow market laws to function as far as possible and permit state intervention only when necessary, in order to guarantee greater equity and give opportunities to the vulnerable population’.^[82] In this context it is no surprise that corruption within this discourse appears as a phenomenon, while primarily present in the public sector can also be found in the private one.

By contrast there is no similar criticism of the neoliberal ideology among the Albanian political parties. Albania is a rather peculiar case in Eastern Europe as one of the few countries where it is impossible to find the ‘red-brown’ ideology that combines the anti-capitalist ideology of the left with the nationalist rhetoric of the right.^[83] A traumatic communist past has prevented the emergence of right- or left-wing political parties that could challenge the dominant neoliberal hegemony, which since 1992 was legitimised as the very opposite of communism.^[84] In part due to their traumatic communist past, Albanians are among the most enthusiastic supporters of liberalisation and globalisation in Europe, with the highest levels of support for globalisation compared to other countries in its region such as Bulgaria, Romania, Greece and Turkey and the EU average.^[85] This in turn has meant that both major political parties, the democratic and the socialist parties, have pursued neoliberal policies and differ very little, if at all, in ideological terms.^[86] The policy distance regarding EU integration in 2008 between the two main parties in Albania, was smaller than in Romania, Bulgaria, Serbia, Slovakia and many other Eastern European countries.^[87]

It is within this dominant neoliberal ideology that one should understand Rama’s articulation of corruption as primarily an administrative phenomenon that it is limited to the public sector. Such articulation reflects and reproduces the dominant neoliberal development model that sees the market as the primary engine of progress and the state as the mayor obstacle in its way. According to Rama, corruption is not inherent to the private sector. This is not to say that all entrepreneurs are honest, but that even the dishonest ones are a product primarily of state intervention:

‘The image of the businessmen as a thief, a robber, as someone dubious, has not been created only by that part of the business community that has acted accordingly, but has primarily been created by the aggressive, arrogant and thieving behaviour of the state in its relation to the business sector [author’s emphasis].’^[88]

From this perspective the government should empower private businesses in order to contain the abuses of the state. The public-private partnership ‘offers a valuable assistance in order to create sound systems of financial administration in the transition or emerging markets.’^[89] The reason why such partnerships reduce corruption is due to ‘the strict demand of the private partner that the money it invests should be managed in the best manner possible, something that state structures neither today nor in the future can achieve.’^[90] It is through cooperation with the private sector, as a superior partner—both in terms of efficiency and honesty—that the public sector can be improved. This is a highly ideological statement that is entirely contrary to the colossal corruption cases through public-private partnerships in the USA and Colombian healthcare systems.

It is important to emphasise here that the ideological context, especially in small and poor countries like Albania, is determined not only by local factors but also by the intervention of powerful international institutions. In Albania the intervention of international organisations such as the World Bank, the Council of Europe and the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), especially during the period from 1998 to 2005, transformed corruption from a signifier that stood for a variety of economic, social, moral and political failures into a very specific phenomenon that was defined as ‘abuse of public office for private gain’ and in practice identified primarily with bribery in the public sector.^[91] Since then, both ‘left-wing’ socialist party governments (1998-2005) and the right-wing democratic party governments (2005-2013) have articulated a discourse of corruption that has served to legitimise a number of neoliberal policies, such as the privatisation of public assets and the marketisation of services including education and healthcare.^[92]

As of 2017, there has been no comparable intervention in Colombia. This is not to say that articulations of corruption in Colombia have not been heavily influenced by international institutions such as the World Bank or the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, whose definitions of corruption have become part of Colombian legislation. Nevertheless, unlike in the case of Albania, international intervention in Colombia has not focused on anti-corruption as much as on the war against drugs and armed subversion. In other words, while the major international intervention during the 1998-2005 period in Albania was focused on anti-corruption, during the same period, 1999-2002, in Colombia such intervention focused on Plan Colombia—a 1.3 billion dollar US military aid package to the Colombian military in order to wage a war against drugs and the left-wing ‘narco-guerrillas’.^[93] As a consequence, the dominant neoliberal articulation of corruption as primarily a public sector disease, promoted especially by international institutions such as the World Bank, the USAID or the International Monetary Fund (IMF), was not as dominant in Colombia as it was in Albania.

Conclusion

In this paper I have compared and contrasted the two official discourses on corruption focusing on the speeches and anti-corruption policies of prime minister Edi Rama in Albania and president Juan Manuel Santos in Colombia during the period 2010-2017. I have tried to point out that there are three key differences in the articulation of corruption between Santos and Rama. First, in Rama’s discourse corruption is located primarily within the public sector in general and the state in particular, while it seems quite absent from the private sector. In Santos’ discourse on the other hand, corruption can be found both in the private and the public sector, as well as in the interaction between the two. Second, while in Rama’s discourse the state is the principal perpetrator of corruption and the private companies and citizens its primary victims, Santos articulates corruption as also perpetrated by private and social actors against the state. Finally, corruption is defined quite narrowly in Rama’s discourse as bribery, whereas Santos defines corruption more widely as a cultural, ethical, moral and political phenomenon.

I have argued that such different articulations do not correspond to different types of corruption or anti-corruption ‘realities’ on the ground. Rather, they reflect two different ideological contexts that shape the articulation of corruption. In Santos’ discourse the articulation of corruption is a reflection in his Third Way ideology, which while prioritising the market, also incorporates criticisms of the neoliberal project, thereby recognising the limits of the market and the need for state intervention when necessary. Rama’s articulation of corruption as an almost exclusively public sector phenomenon, on the other hand, reflects his dominant neoliberal ideology that sees the private sector as the engine of development and the state as a potential hindrance. In both cases, the discourse of corruption does not simply reflect corruption realities on the ground, but serves to constitute the public sector in general and the state in particular from a very specific ideological standpoint. In other words, as Gupta has pointed out in the case of India, ‘the discourse of corruption turns out to be a key arena through which the state, citizens, and other organizations and aggregations come to be imagined.’^[94] This is why, instead of focusing on corruption only as a problem that should be overcome, it is important to ‘see it as a mechanism through which “the state” itself is discursively constituted’.^[95] As I have tried to show in this paper, such discursive construction has an important ideological dimension, especially at the elite level.

As corruption slowly becomes a central topic of debate in Colombia following the 2016 peace agreement with the FARC, it is likely that international institutions such as the World Bank, the IMF, or the USAID will become more fully involved in its anti-corruption programmes. Judging from the Albanian experience, it is likely that such interventions will produce a more narrow and economic understanding of corruption, where it will become primarily located in the public sector. In that case, it will be important to keep in mind that corruption is an ideologically laden concept that gives rise to anti-corruption policies that are not simply technical solutions to the ‘reality’ of corruption. Corruption and anti-corruption discourses are arenas through which local and international institutions ideologically constitute the state, the public and the private sphere.