STREP CRIME and CULTURE Final Activity Report

STREP CRIME and CULTURE Final Activity Report

SIXTH FRAMEWORK PROGRAMME OF THE EUROPEAN COMMISSION RESEARCH PROJECT: CRIME AND CULTURE Crime as a Cultural Problem. The Relevance of Perceptions of Corruption to Crime Prevention. A Comparative Cultural Study in the EU-Accession States Bulgaria and Romania, the EU-Candidate States Turkey and Croatia and the EU-States Germany, Greece and United Kingdom Project no.: 028442 Instrument: SPECIFIC TARGETED RESEARCH PROJECT Thematic Priority: PRIORITY 7, FP6-2004-CITIZENS-5 FINAL ACTIVITY REPORT Due date of deliverable: September 15, 2009 Actual submission date: October 15, 2009 Start date of project: January 1, 2006 Duration: January 2006 - July 2009 Organisation name of lead contractor for this report: University of Konstanz Revision (draft 1) Dissemination level: PU (Public) 2 TABLE OF CONTENTS Project participants………………………………………………………………………...5 1. Project execution………………………………………………………………………..7 1.1 Overview of project objectives and methodology……………………………….........7 1.2 Work performed, contractors involved, end results and policy related findings……………………………………………………………….........17 WP 1: Corruption in Germany: Perceptions of Corruption and Anti-corruption Policy….17 WP 2: Public Perceptions of Corruption and Anti-corruption in Bulgaria………………..23 WP 3: Cultural and Institutional Aspects of Corruption in Romania……………………..29 WP 4: Perceptions of Corruption and the Relevance of Anti-Corruption Discourses in the frame of Turkey’s Bid for EU Accession……………………………....33 WP 5: Corruption in Croatia: Social Perception and Anti-Corruption Policy…………….37 WP 6: The construction of corruption in Greece: A normative or cultural issue?...............42 WP 7: Perceptions of Corruption in the United Kingdom: political, economic, juridical and administrative preconditions………………………………………………...48 WP 8: Anti-corruption policies and respective discourses within the EU………………...52 WP 9: Cross-national comparative analysis of the evaluation of anti-corruption measures in the participating countries of the project…………………………………….55 WP 10: Organisation and Realisation of Final Interactive Scholars-Experts Conference and Report of the Conference………………………………………………..64 1.3 Project meetings………………………………………………………………………66 1. Kick-off meeting, 2-3 February 2006, Centre for Liberal Strategies, Sofia, Bulgaria…..66 2. Project workshop, 2-3 June 2006, Galatasaray University, Istanbul, Turkey…………….67 3. Project meeting, 3-4 November 2006, Faculty of Sociology and Social Work, University of Bucharest and Research Institute for Quality of Life, Romanian Academy, Bucharest, Romania……………………………………………….72 4. Project meeting, 1-2 February 2007, University of Konstanz…....................................75 5. Project meeting, Dubrovnik, 17-20 January 2008, Inter-University Centre…………...79 2. Publishable results of the plan for using and disseminating the knowledge ..................85 Perceptions of corruption in Germany……………………………………………………85 Perceptions of corruption in Bulgaria…………………………………………………….97 Perceptions of corruption in Romania……………………………………………………106 Perceptions of corruption in Turkey…………………………………………………….. 117 Perceptions of corruption in Croatia……………………………………………………...132 Perceptions of corruption in Greece……………………………………………………...145 Perceptions of corruption in the United Kingdom………………………………………..160 Anti-corruption policies and respective discourses within the EU…………………….....172 3. Final plan for using and disseminating the knowledge ………………………………..182 3 3.1 General remark about project dissemination activities………………………………182 3.2. Project publications………………………………………………………………….182 3.3 Project web site………………………………………………………………………190 3.4 Project flyer…………………………………………………………………………..191 3.5 Scholarly education…………………………………………………………………..191 3.6 Print and electronic media coverage of the project…………………………………..192 3.7 Radio coverage on the project (interviews)…………………………………………..193 3.8 Public lectures (broadcast by radio/TV)……………………………………………...193 3.9 Lectures and panel discussions……………………………………………………….193 3.10 Participation in international congresses, conferences……………………………...194 3.11 Final project conference………….……....................................................................195 3.12 Dissemination of knowledge-Overview table……………………………………....196 4 Project participants: Participant Participant Participant name Participant Country ∗ Role ∗∗ no. short name CO 1 UNIVERSITAET KONSTANZ UKON Germany CR 2 EBERHARD-KARLS- UTUE Germany UNIVERSITAET TUEBINGEN CR 3 CENTRE FOR LIBERAL CLS Bulgaria STRATEGIES CR 4 RESEARCH INSTITUTE FOR THE ICCV Romania QUALITY OF LIFE - ROMANIAN ACADEMY CR 5 GALATASARAY UNIVERSITY GSU Turkey CR 6 UNIVERSITY OF ZAGREB UZG Croatia CR 7 PANTEION UNIVERSITY OF PU Greece SOCIAL AND POLITICAL SCIENCE CR 8 ST ANTONY'S COLLEGE, SEESOX United UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD Kingdom The members of the Project Consortium ‘Crime and Culture’ ∗ CO = Coordinator CR = Contractor 5 Co-ordinator contact details: Prof. Dr. Hans-Georg Soeffner, Person in Charge [email protected] Prof. Dr. Dirk Tänzler, Scientific Co-ordinator [email protected] Dr. Angelos Giannakopoulos, Head of the Project Office [email protected] Address: University of Konstanz Research Group Sociology of Knowledge Universitätsstr. 10 Room F 520A D-78457 Konstanz Germany Phone: ++49 (0)7531 88 3129 Fax: ++49 7531 88 3194 Email: [email protected] Project web site: www.uni-konstanz.de/crimeandculture/index.htm 6 1. Project execution 1.1 Overview of project objectives and methodology The theoretical background Why Culture? Mr. Olli Rehn, the commissioner responsible for the EU-enlargement referring to Bulgaria and Romania has stated in an interview: “There are serious efforts of reform (…). Corruption is also a cultural phenomenon. To eliminate it will take a long time, and, well, this will never be achieved totally” (Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 28.01.2006; Translation by the Authors). Mr. Rehn’s statement is an expression of realism. Corruption is a universal problem even in the modern states of the West. What Mr. Rehn also suggests is that corruption is a much bigger problem in some regions than in others. – But a problem for whom and of what kind? An example from another continent may help us to look at the subject of interest from another perspective: One of the most recent prime ministers of the Philippines lost his office because he was too honest and avoided strictly all illegal behaviour. In the eyes of a Western observer, he incorporated all the liberal democratic principles modern citizens believe in as preconditions for ‘good practice’, if not, like Voltaire’s Candide, for the “best of all possible worlds”. In the eyes of the Philippine people and voters, this honest man appeared incompetent and immoral because he proved himself unable to look after the members of his immediate and extended family and his friends. Why should people without personal relations to this prime minister have trusted him, seeing as he did not behave responsibly and loyally even to his intimate relatives and companions? In the Philippine case, the Western model of democratic institutions and political culture does not fit with the expectations and the social practice of the people in everyday-life. The conflict here results from the incompatibility between, on the one hand, the paternalistic habit in a traditional system of moral reciprocity combined with substantial benefits still alive in the popular imagination and, on the other, the individualistic habit of competitive actors in a modern, functionally differentiated system based on the anonymous principle of formal legal rights as represented by the unhappy prime minister. Not only the Philippines held nepotism and gift exchange for ‘good practices’. What we subsume under the category ‘corruption’ may be a universal type of social practice, but it also holds different cultural meaning. In the current process of enlargement and integration, the EU acts like the Philippine prime minister and then wonders why people so ungratefully persist in their bad practice. This misunderstanding is the starting point of our research; our task will be to reconstruct the motives and causes behind the conflict. Efforts to prevent corruption within the EU and in the EU candidate countries generally consist of a set of administrative measures oriented to institutionalised values and goals, put into effect by experts ‘from the top down’. The experts do their best. But, neither in the elementary definitions determining existing counter-corruption policies nor in their implementation are those everyday life orientations rooted in socio-cultural contexts and 7 conducive to corrupt behaviour taken into account. Here, we see the structural causes of the limited effects of the counter-corruption policies currently being applied within the EU and its candidate states. They do not reach the ‘bottom’ at which corrupt behaviour and its social legitimation prosper and which is constituted by cultural modes of perception and reasoning on corruption. Therefore, countermeasures undertaken at a general societal level must rely on our knowledge of these modes of perception and reasoning. But we cannot develop an ‘easy’ solution where we ‘add’ some ‘forgotten’ aspects to the existing procedures because these new aspects conflict with the ‘logic’ of these procedures. If this is true, a practical consequence of our theoretical assumption on corruption as a cultural problem is that change in the current situation presupposes a preceding

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