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The Big QuestionHow Can Nations Break the Cycle of Crime and Corruption?
At length Corruption, like a gen’ral flood(So long by watchful Ministers withstood),Shall deluge all; and Avarice creeping on,Spread like a low-born mist, and blot the Sun.
—Alexander Pope, Moral Essays (ep. III, l. 135)
If not quite as apocalyptic as Pope would have us believe, corruption and crime all too often drag nations into a cycle of deprivation and wanton greed—companies bribing bureaucrats in exchange for lucrative contracts, petty graft greasing the palms of low-level civil servants, and powerful politicians enriching themselves at the expense of their people and the advancement of society. How do nations, especially developing ones, escape this swamp? World Policy Journal asked a panel of experts to weigh in on the challenges.
The Big Question is also a multimedia project on theWorld Policy Journalwebsite. Discussions of pressing global issues can be found online at www.worldpolicy.org . [End Page 6] [End Page 7]
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Daniel Kaufmann on State Capture
Crime and corruption do not always co-exist, share the same determinants, or respond to the same strategies and measures. A corrupt and authoritarian police state can control common crime, as in North Korea. Conversely, common crime can be a challenge to countries with satisfactory anti-corruption track records, like Chile.
Crime rates tend to be higher where there is high unemployment, high socio-economic inequality, and lax gun laws. Corruption thrives where civil liberties, free press, transparency, and contestable politics are absent. A functioning rule of law matters for controlling both crime and corruption, but again differences emerge: an independent judiciary is crucial for combating political corruption; an effective police is important for fighting petty corruption as well as common crime. There are also differences between the determinants of common crime and organized crime, since the latter does relate to corruption.
Most research on corruption focuses on developing countries, which is unfortunate. When corruption indexes focus exclusively on cruder forms of corruption (what we think of as typical cases of bribery), they mask one of the most serious governance challenges facing countries like the United States today—so-called legal corruption and state capture by powerful corporations. (For evidence of this, one need only look to the undue influence exerted by Wall Street and mortgage giants over regulations leading up to the financial crisis, or by giant carmakers over [End Page 3] automobile safety regulators.) Indeed, research suggests that legal corruption and state capture in the United States are extremely high when compared with most countries in the world, and higher than any other industrialized oecd country. Thus, contrary to popular notions, both developing and rich countries face corruption challenges, although their form may differ.
The strategies to combat different manifestations of crime and corruption will differ from each other, and must be tailored to country context. Yet crime and corruption do share one important thing in common. To address them, and to be prepared to take on powerful interests, they require political will, leadership, and integrity at the top.
Daniel Kaufmann is a senior fellow in the Global Economy and Development Program at the Brookings Institution.
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Marina Ottaway on Total Reform
Corruption should not be approached as a moral problem, as too often happens, but as a symptom of serious political and economic problems that need correcting.
Petty corruption, such as low-ranking civil servants demanding payment for services they should provide for free, is a problem that requires restructuring the civil service, reducing the number of public employees within a government, and providing those who remain with decent wages. Attempts to curb petty corruption are unlikely to have an impact when extracting payments from the public is the only way a government employee can feed his family.
Grand corruption, such as large payments to high-ranking officials to secure lucrative public contracts, requires political solutions. If there is no renewal of the government and the political class, grand corruption inevitably becomes a problem. Frequent turnover of government officials make it more difficult for corrupt networks to consolidate power. Democracy is the best anti-corruption measure.
The creation of anti-corruption commissions is not a solution unless it is part of broader reform. A commission can throw light on a few cases, but no commission is going to be able to dismantle the networks of corruption that develop in countries where the same people have been in power for long periods.
Donor countries worried about corruption should focus on two tasks: putting in place good control mechanisms over the funds they provide; and promoting fundamental political, economic, and administrative reform.
Marina Ottaway is director of the Middle East Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
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Andrés Cañizález on Latin Gangs
In Latin America, we need to undertake a broad institutional rebuilding if we are to break the power of criminal gangs over our societies, which so far have acted with the complicit wink of corrupt forces. Such rebuilding should take into account the corruption within police forces and justice administrations. Yet both are merely the tip of a huge iceberg that includes vast political incompetence, the absence of public power, and the reluctance of citizens to stand up to the de facto powers of organized crime.
The Line-Up Rogue$ Gallery
To the president go the spoils. The twentieth century’s most corrupt heads of state, and their estimated wealth embezzled while in office:
Isolated police or judicial reforms are not enough. We need concerted actions involving traditional political, economic, and social [End Page 4] players; a new institutional framework that can facilitate the breakup of criminal networks and the corruption they breed. Today, the fight against criminal powers, especially those linked to drug trafficking, requires transnational and interdisciplinary efforts. A nation cannot be successful by itself. We face a challenge that demands wide-ranging and coordinated actions.
Andrés Cañizález is a researcher at the Centre of Communication Research at Universidad Católica Andres Bello.
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Louise Shelley on Rotting Fish
While individual countries can address the cycle of crime and corruption, in a globalized world much also depends on the international community. Trade partners, multinational organizations, corporations, and transnational crime syndicates all can affect a single country’s ability to combat corruption.
The expression that a “fish rots from the head” explains the difficulty of breaking the cycle of crime and corruption where leadership is rotten to the core. Conversely, countries that have leaders determined to address these problems have made progress—witness Italy in the 1990s, Georgia after the Rose Revolution, and Hong Kong today. Still, the commitment cannot be short-term, lest these scourges reassert themselves vigorously.
Unfortunately, efforts to combat crime and corruption can be undermined by external forces. Countries with rich natural resources may have difficulty controlling corruption in the face of multinational businesses that are prepared to pay large bribes for lucrative contracts. A vigorous and law-abiding civil society may be undermined by foreign powers that tolerate or even facilitate the corruption of leaders whose cooperation is needed in the name of military expediency. And countries that are strategically located along the transit routes for drugs, arms, and people may find that transnational crime groups intensify the problem of curbing crime and corruption.
Louise Shelley is director of the Terrorism, Transnational Crime and Corruption Center at George Mason University.
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Denisa Kostovicova & Vesna Bojicic-Dzelilovic on Weak States
There is a tendency to impose a uniform set of remedies for the problems of crime and corruption that plague post-conflict regions like the Balkans. It assumes that states are willing partners in ending and punishing illegitimate practices. Often, they are not. When crime and corruption pervade a society, it’s not that the state is unable to check the predatory rule of its elites. On the contrary, it reflects the ability of power holders to sustain a system of arbitrary rule and institutional instability. This keeps the state weak but not failing and the government becomes involved in violating the very rules it sets and is supposed to enforce.
Breaking the self-reinforcing cycle of crime, corruption, and persistent state weakness requires dismantling structures that have little interest in building a new system. Locally-defined legitimate rule must be based on the commitment and capacity to mobilize resources for the benefit of the general public. In today’s interconnected world, this is the task that no state, least of all a post-conflict one, can do on its own or by following universally prescribed rules. [End Page 5]
Denisa Kostovicova is a lecturer in global politics and Vesna Bojicic-Dzelilovic is a senior research fellow at the London School of Economics and Political Science.
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Alexis Sinduhije on Human Rights
Crime and corruption are deeply rooted in many countries, including Burundi, my small homeland in central Africa. In such countries, corruption sustains crime, while criminal acts protect the corrupt. In Burundi, the state commits crimes against humanity, despite the fact that we are now supposedly a democracy at peace. Each day, at least 20 people are assassinated for political reasons—more deaths than during our 12 years of civil war. And most such deaths today are fueled by corruption.
Crime and corruption reign in poor countries, where there is little international interest in eradicating it. In my country, the global community prefers to maintain the semblance of peace rather than address the violent abuse of basic human rights. In other corrupt, crime-ridden states, rich natural resources and strategic locations serve as a protection from scrutiny or action. Global cartels also support crime and corruption—working to protect their own kind even when it is not in the best interests of the broad population. One of the most striking examples of this is how the leaders of countries bordering Zimbabwe protect President Robert Mugabe from the accusations of “colonial powers”—feeding the cycle of crime and corruption.
We recognize that the solution to this vicious circle must be local and that it depends on a social movement by individuals dedicated to change, many of whom may be risking their lives. Each country has such courageous people—writers, poets, lawyers, activists. We need to take responsibility for our own nations and people, and make sacrifices to fulfill the obligations we hold to humankind.
Alexis Sinduhije is a candidate for president in Burundi’s 2010 elections. In 2008, he was named one of the 100 most influential people in the world by Time Magazine.
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Zhu Lijia on Naming and Shaming
Institutional anti-corruption reform is critical to any country that wants to extricate itself from the scourge of corruption. In 2009, the Chinese leadership instituted some important policies to punish and prevent corruption. The goal of these reforms was to make administrative operations more transparent, and guarantee citizen participation in government management and supervision.
So far, the results have been notable, from an increase in democratic participation in the selection of local leaders, to more disclosures from our national officials about their property holdings, to stronger performance evaluation systems. Simultaneously, more and more Chinese are accepting as a core public value the idea that corruption is shameful—something that has been extremely important in restraining corrupt practices.
Zhu Lijia is professor of public policy at the Chinese Academy of Governance.
