CORRUPTION Syndromes of Corruption

The international setting 17
All three of these developments are important concerns in this book.
The broad trend toward economic liberalization, and the questions it
raises about the role and soundness of state, political, and social institutions,
will play a direct role in the process by which I define corruption
syndromes and locate countries within them (chapter 3). The role of
some international businesses in the corruption problems of specific
countries will become evident in several of the case studies to come
(chapters 4–7). This chapter deals primarily with the third connection:
the ways policy and analytical aspects of the consensus worldview have
converged at a global level to influence both corruption and the ways
we understand it. Corruption has come to be seen as both cause and effect
of uneven or incomplete economic liberalization, and of an intrusive,
ineffective state. Rank-ordering countries from high to low corruption
effectively defines the problem as the same everywhere, and its scope and
effects are judged primarily in economic terms. Reform is seen as moving
societies toward a neoliberal ideal of market economics, and market-like
political processes, facilitated by a lean, technically competent state that
is little more than a kind of referee in the economic arena. Anti-corruption
agendas thus tend to vary rather little from one country to the next.
The problem is not that these ideas are utterly wrong: there are, as we
shall see, good reasons to believe that corruption delays, distorts, and
diverts economic and democratic development, and new data and scholarship
have taught us a great deal. Rather, the difficulty is that the
dominant worldview is incomplete: it diverts our attention from complex
and contrasting underlying causes, and from qualitative differences in
various societies’ experiences with corruption. At the level of reform
much is said about fitting anti-corruption strategies to differing societies,
but the most frequent approach is still to assemble ‘‘toolkits’’ of ideas that
may have worked somewhere, while providing little guidance on what to
do, and what not to do, in particular settings. This book cannot demolish
the consensus worldview – indeed, in some respects it builds upon it.
Rather, my goal is to change the ways we think about corruption, to
increase our awareness of how and why it varies among and within
societies, and to offer a more realistic view about the challenges of reform.
Consensus and its limitations
Calling any state of opinion a ‘‘consensus’’ is inherently risky; indeed,
ideas continue to evolve over issues such as the role of state institutions
in development and reform. Still, it is striking how quickly past debates
over corruption – so often hung up on definitions, divided over the
question of effects, and mired in a paralyzing relativism – have given