Anticorruption: How to Beat Back Political & Corporate Graft
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Dædalus Summer 2018 How to Beat Back Political & Corporate Graft Dædalus Journal of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences Summer 2018 Anticorruption: How to Beat Back Political & Corporate Graft Robert I. Rotberg, guest editor with Alina Mungiu-Pippidi · Bo Rothstein Michael Johnston · Matthew M. Taylor Paul M. Heywood · Susan Rose-Ackerman Zephyr Teachout · Louise I. Shelley · Mark L. Wolf Sérgio Fernando Moro · Sarah Bracking Rotimi T. Suberu · Jon S.T. Quah · Minxin Pei Accomplishing Anticorruption: Propositions & Methods Robert I. Rotberg Abstract: The insidious practice of corruption cripples institutions, consumes communities, and cuts deeply into the very structure of people’s lives. It destroys nations and saps their moral fiber. Corruption is invasive and unforgiving, degrading governance, distorting and criminalizing national priorities, and privileging acquisitive rent-seeking, patrimonial theft, and personal gains over concern for the commonweal. It also costs an estimated $1 trillion annually–roughly a loss of 2 percent of global GDP–and disproportionally affects the most needy countries and their peoples. This opening essay shows that these baleful results need not occur: the battle against corrupt practices can be won, as it has been in several contemporary countries and throughout history. Ethical universalism can replace particularism. Since collective behavioral pat- terns and existing forms of political culture need to be altered, anticorruption endeavors must be guided from the apex of society. Consummate political will makes a critical difference. Anticorruption successes are hard-won and difficult to sustain. This essay and this special issue show what can and must be done. Confronting and curbing corruption are not im- possible. We now know how to transform wildly corrupt countries into largely graft-free polities. We know what works reliably, what works occasionally, and what works only under optimal conditions. We robert i. rotberg, a Fellow of know that talented political will is essential. But we the American Academy since 2005, also know that altering corrupting incentives for in- is President Emeritus of the World dividuals is less powerful than shifting the contours Peace Foundation and Founding 1 Director of the Program on Intra of behavior collectively. state Conflict and Conflict Reso Corruption is a systemic malady, emerging from lution at the Harvard Kennedy the top down rather than the bottom up.2 That is, School. He is the author of The Cor- the stain of corruption spreads from the attitudes ruption Cure: How Citizens and Lead- and permissive policies of persons at the top of po- ers Can Combat Graft (2017), Africa litical and corporate entities downward. Leaders set Emerges: Consummate Challenges, the tone; misconduct at one level of authority im- Abundant Opportunities (2013), and Transformative Political Leadership plicitly authorizes the next. Integrity or its absence (2012), and the editor of Corrup- therefore seeps into the collective societal conscious- tion, Global Security, and World Order ness: either to make corruption an ongoing social (2009). practice and an essential (even if de jure forbidden) © 2018 by Robert I. Rotberg doi:10.1162/DAED_ a_00513 5 Accomplishing component of a governing political cul- Effectively, these peoples–mostly Eu- Anticorruption: ture; or more rarely, to accomplish the re- ropean, followed in the twentieth century Propositions & Methods verse, creating legal and normative barriers by a few Asian and African populations– to wholesale approval of corrupt practices. moved away from particularism, where- We know that corruption can be reduced in “individuals [are] treated differently or even nearly extirpated at the national according to status,” to what Alina Mun- level because a number of nation-states giu-Pippidi and others call ethical univer- (most of them small and tightly controlled) salism, or the equal treatment of all in the have in modern times succeeded in transi- delivery of government services and op- tioning from wholesale corruption to the portunities. As Mungiu-Pippidi asserts in pursuit of a fully ethical system. One or this volume, two small, fully democratic states have also Particularism, rather than ethical universal- managed to develop successfully without ism, is closer to the state of nature (or the de- enduring any periods of corruption, in part fault social organization) and . its opposite, by introducing widespread changes in their a norm of open and equal access or public in- peoples’ understandings of corruption. In tegrity, is by no means guaranteed by polit- China, the world’s most populous nation, ical evolution.4 President Xi Jinping’s lengthy and aggres- sive anticorruption campaign may result But when a society does reach that point, in the diminution of many enduring cor- acculturative anticorruption efforts have rupt endeavors, even if his foremost goals been internalized by the political culture for the campaign are doubtless political. and the body politic. In other words, eth- Fortunately, to buttress what we have ical universalism (hardly a utopian con- learned from the contemporary experience cept) replaces corruption and patrimo- of those democratic and quasi-democrat- nialism–malign allocational norms–with ic entities that have beaten back corrup- public-spiritedness and fairness in gover- tion and effectively altered their prevailing nance and politics, corporate behavior, and political cultures, we also now understand daily life. Ethical universalism “presumes that today’s least corrupt countries were that all inhabitants of a jurisdiction will be once themselves promiscuously crooked, treated fairly, equally, and tolerantly–that but shifted incrementally over the nine- minorities are entitled to the same privi- teenth and twentieth centuries from hav- leges and opportunities as majorities, and ing widespread to very limited tolerance that groups large and small can anticipate of corruption. These changes took place receiving similar rights and privileges.”5 thanks to gifted leadership, the influence In the Nordics, elsewhere in Northern of the Enlightenment, the spread of mass Europe, and even in the Antipodes, there education, the emergence of autochtho- has been a major and profound shift from nous churches, and the rise of merit-based the societal expectation that position, for- bureaucratic systems. Bo Rothstein’s es- tune, and licenses are obtained primarily say in this volume emphasizes the role of by buying influence and access from rul- education: “With the introduction of free ers and their bureaucrats to a presumption public education,” he writes, “citizens got that such goods can be attained through a stake in a well-functioning public sector personal achievement and merit. Collec- and thus found a reason to oppose corrup- tive behavioral responses have evolved to- tion.”3 Education also engendered loyal- ward an anticorrupt norm. In other words, ty to the state and an embryonic sense of elites, and later entire populations, first in nationality. Prussia and the Nordic nations and then 6 Dædalus, the Journal of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences in the Netherlands, Britain, New Zealand, rangement.8 One expects to be extorted in Robert I. and Canada, gradually discovered that Kenya, Nigeria, or Zambia; but not in Bo- Rotberg their political and corporate endeavors tswana or Mauritius; and less often now- could succeed optimally only if the temp- adays in Benin and Ghana. The striking tation to gain power and preferment by differences in attitudes in those less cor- virtue of corrupt transactions and influ- rupt polities come after decades of leader- ence were reduced as much as possible. induced revampings of “standard operat- These ineluctable advances in the func- ing procedures.” tioning of these relatively small societ- ies constituted a virtuous circle: empow- The less corrupt African societies, and erment encouraged institutions to func- those in Europe, Asia, and Australasia, are tion and citizens to use them well. Citizen separated from the run of their peers by participation in turn strengthened politi- critical shifts in prevailing political cultures cal institutions. As Matthew Taylor puts that took place during the last sixty years, it: “In a word, Denmark.”6 that were engineered from above, and that Elsewhere, by contrast, regional cor- were orchestrated largely by example and ruption remains. For example, although with an emphasis on integrity. Taylor, in Chileans’ interactions with their police his essay in this volume, calls these strik- forces and bureaucrats are free of petty ing anticorruption improvements “positive corruption, in nearby Argentina, Boliv- equilibrium shifts.” In earlier centuries, ia, Peru, and Brazil, that is not always the the Nordics and other peoples achieved case. And in all of those South American the same radical enhancements in expec- countries, among others, grand corruption tations, but over much longer periods and still flourishes, as clearly demonstrated by much more gradually. Rothstein’s essay in Brazil’s Odebrecht corporate bribing scan- this collection emphasizes that the Nordic dal and the ongoing Lava Jato investigation transformation was largely driven “indi- and prosecution of intertwining corrupt rectly” (that is, anticorruption was a by- Petrobras, Odebrecht, and government of- product of robust reforms universalizing ficials. (Judge Sérgio Fernando Moro, who public goods), a strategy that Rothstein also presides over the Lava