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CONTROLLING CORRUPTION OR CONTROLLING STATES? EU AND ANTI-CORRUPTION POLICIES: THE CASE OF BULGARIA AND ROMANIA 2000-2008 By DANIELA IONESCU A thesis submitted to The University of Birmingham For the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY School of Government and Society The University of Birmingham December 2016 University of Birmingham Research Archive e-theses repository This unpublished thesis/dissertation is copyright of the author and/or third parties. The intellectual property rights of the author or third parties in respect of this work are as defined by The Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988 or as modified by any successor legislation. Any use made of information contained in this thesis/dissertation must be in accordance with that legislation and must be properly acknowledged. Further distribution or reproduction in any format is prohibited without the permission of the copyright holder. ABSTRACT This thesis challenges the idea that the EU anti-corruption policies’ main rationale is to root out corruption. The research hypothesis is that EU anti-corruption policies are used not so much to control corruption as to control and diminish the powers of nation states and to redesign the classic power balance in these democratic states. The actors who end up being empowered are supranational, international and non-governmental entities: the EU/ the European Commission, International Organizations and domestic civil society with a pro-EU agenda. The domestic decision-makers are structurally disempowered by the anti-corruption policies. The lessons derived from the specific experience of Romania and Bulgaria have a general value because their model inspired the recent decision of the European Commission to introduce the same anti-corruption policies across the EU. Table of Contents CHAPTER ONE Introduction ................................................................................................................................. 3 CHAPTER TWO Literature Review, Theoretical Framework and Methodology ........................................... 19 CHAPTER THREE Content Analysis on European Commission’s Progress Reports for Bulgaria and Romania 2000-2004. Consistency of EC evaluation discourse ............................................................. 42 CHAPTER FOUR Consistency of the NGOs discourse on corruption. Watch dogs or regime enhancers . Relationship dynamics with the Bulgarian/Romanian Governments 2004-2008 CHAPTER FIVE The role of European Commission in the NGOs ................................................................. 178 CHAPTER SIX Relevance of Bulgarian/ Romanian case for the new EU Anti-corruption strategy for all 27 Member States .................................................................................................................... 206 CHAPTER SEVEN Conclusions .............................................................................................................................. 241 LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS APADOR-CH Association for Protection of Human Rights in Romania – Helsinki Committee CCP Coalition for a Clean Parliament CSD Centre for Study of Democracy EC European Commission EP European Parliament EU European Union FH Freedom House IMF International Monetary Fund LDP Liberal Democratic Party NLP National Liberal Party NMS II National Movement Simeon II OSCE Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe OJ Official Journal OSI Open Society Institute SAR Romanian Academic Society SDP Social Democratic Party TIR Transparency International Romania TJA Truth and Justice Alliance UN United Nations UNDP United Nations Development Program USAID United States Agency for International Development WB World Bank CHAPTER ONE Introduction Ever since 1996, when James Wolfensohn, President of the World Bank, declared corruption as “public enemy number one” of economic development, the phenomenon became a matter of global concern and global governance. At Stockholm in 2009, the EU declared that corruption was “a transnational threat that challenges the EU internal security”. The EU decided it needed to take charge, “since the problems associated with corruption cannot be adequately solved by Member States alone”. In doing so, the Commission built up its Anti-Corruption strategy, based on mechanisms and policies developed in Bulgaria and Romania: “The only EU monitoring toll that also covers the anti-corruption issue is the Cooperation and Verification Mechanism for Romania and Bulgaria, which has managed over time to maintain or revive a certain momentum for reforms” (Commission 2011:9). Also in 2014, the Commission would release its first Anti-Corruption Report for all EU countries, explicitly following the model of the CVM for Bulgaria and Romania: “The EU Anti-Corruption Report also builds on the Cooperation and Verification Mechanism (CVM), a post-accession follow-up mechanism for Romania and Bulgaria that is managed by the European Commission” (Commission 2014:38). 3 Significantly, the perception of corruption changed from being a parochial problem, affecting a few former communist countries (e.g. Bulgaria and Romania), to a problem of concern to all twenty-seven EU countries, with no experience of communism or such high levels of corruption. Against this background, the thesis signals an anomaly in the EU’s recent discourse against corruption. The EC decided to extend across all EU countries those anti- corruption mechanisms and policies which were applied to Bulgaria and Romania. Such mechanisms, however, did not prove efficient in fighting corruption, even after eighteen years. Moreover, they had a negative impact on the functioning of the democratic institutions of these countries, exacerbating existing problems, as will be detailed later. The question then arises as to why the EU would want to promote a seemingly inefficient regime across all its member states, when it also had an undermining impact on the democratic process. This conundrum directs attention to the problem of why these policies proved inefficient and to the EU’s strategies in addressing corruption. The EU’s response to such poor results has been to blame it on the inability or unwillingness of these countries to comply with the anti-corruption policies properly (Euractiv 2012; European Commission 2013). Most studies discussing EU anti- corruption policies (the Cooperation and Verification Mechanism) in Bulgaria and Romania endorse this idea: the responsibility for the inefficiency of the EU policies is explained by resistance from parts of the domestic political class to the introduction of stricter controls on corruption. (Vachudova 2009; Spendzarova 2010; Spendzarova and 4 Vachudova 2012; Alegre, Susie et.al 2009; Carp 2014; Phinnemore 2010; Pridham 2007; Gallagher 2009). The view taken here is that these arguments are unsatisfactory explanations either for the failure of these policies, or for their negative impact on the democratic systems. The EU’s bid to promote them as a panacea would also, therefore, seem to be viewed with caution. The main conceptual problem is that the recipients of the anti-corruption policies in the targeted countries have been blamed, without first proving that the policies were adequate to deal with corruption. Nor has there been any examination of the role of the main managers of the process – the European Commission, together with the IOs and NGOS involved in the process – and consideration of their responsibility in the negative outcomes of the anti-corruption policies. The domestic political class has been scrutinised regarding its failures in the fight against corruption but the consistency between the EU’s official discourse of rooting out corruption and the way it has implemented its policies has not been critically analysed. Finally, neither the EU nor the existing literature have tried to explain why the EU would go against its own discourse of efficiency in solving systemic problems (such as corruption) by promoting solutions which have proved inefficient and which, moreover, have proved detrimental to the existing democratic systems in these countries. 5 There is, however, a body of literature, outside the EU framework, which discusses corruption as a matter of global governance, when it has been carried out by IOs. Such studies have published evidences which provide a different take on this aspect. It has been noticed that it is common for international actors who promote development policies (e.g. IMF and WB) to construct or invent a set of problems – ideally a state of crisis – in order to justify their intervention in the internal affairs of a targeted country (Berstein 1990; Ferguson 1990; Gupta 1995; Escobar 1995; Evans 1997; Polzer 2001; Moultrie 1998; Munro et. al 1999; Mazrui 1999; Camerer 1999; Hopkin 2002; Bratsis 2003; Bukovansky 2006; Chang 2002; 2009; 2012). The implication of these findings is that the anti-corruption crusade is not an apolitical process that carries a genuine moral and economic justification. It is rather a credible pretext devised to advance neo-liberal interests. This approach considers that corruption, its definition and its solutions are largely a construct, designed to carry a neo-liberal agenda of diminishing the public sector and undermining the credibility of the state as a manager of the economy, meanwhile legitimizing the intervention of international actors (IOs), of Non-Governmental Organizations that are not democratically accountable (e.g. ‘watchdogs of corruption’) and global business corporations (Bukovansky 2006;

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