CORRUPTION Anthropological Perspectives
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CORRUPTION Anthropological Perspectives Edited by DIETER HALLER AND CRIS SHORE Pluto P Press LONDON • ANN ARBOR, MI HHalleraller 0000 pprere iiiiii 111/4/051/4/05 44:20:14:20:14 ppmm 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 Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data applied for 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Designed and produced for Pluto Press by Chase Publishing Services Ltd, Fortescue, Sidmouth EX10 9QG, England Typeset from disk by Stanford DTP Services, Northampton, England Printed and bound in the European Union by Antony Rowe, Chippenham and Eastbourne, England HHalleraller 0000 pprere iivv 111/4/051/4/05 44:20:14:20:14 ppmm 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 HHalleraller 0000 pprere v 111/4/051/4/05 44:20:15:20:15 ppmm 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 HHalleraller 0000 pprere vvii 111/4/051/4/05 44:20:15:20:15 ppmm 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 HHalleraller 0011 cchap01hap01 1 111/4/051/4/05 44:19:36:19:36 ppmm 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 HHalleraller 0011 cchap01hap01 2 111/4/051/4/05 44:19:36:19:36 ppmm 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’.