Introduction
When the promise to enlarge to the Western Balkans was issued by EU leaders at the Thessaloniki Summit in 2003, democracy and rule of law were declared from the very first paragraph to be ‘common values’. This was encouraging, especially given the chal-lenges historically encountered by external ‘civilising’ empires in their attempts to trans-form the Balkans. Describing such ventures by the ancient Greeks, historian Arnaldo Momigliano wrote: ‘But the Greeks were seldom in a position to check what natives told them: they did not know the languages. The natives, on the other hand, being bilingual, had a shrewd idea of what the Greeks wanted to hear and spoke accordingly. This recip-rocal position did not make for sincerity and real understanding’ [Momigliano, 1975].
Strengthening the rule of law and public administration reform are acknowledged as key issues ten years later, after the successful accession of Croatia. The Council showed that it did not underestimate the challenge when stating that these ‘issues should be tackled early in the enlargement process to allow the maximum time to establish the necessary legislation, institutions and solid track records of implementation before the negotia-tions are closed’ [Council of the European Union, 2011]. This wisdom is grounded in the mixed experience of the big bang enlargement wave, and, in particular, the negative experience of Romania and Bulgaria, which years after accession are still struggling to meet the established criteria in these areas. This chapter briefly examines the progress made from the perspective of control of corruption, applies a general statistical model explaining corruption and assesses the current policies and their chances of success in controlling corruption.
BACKGROUnD
Defining corruption is such a controversial business that the United Nations Conven-tion against CorrupConven-tion (UNCAC, which entered into force on 14 December 2005) does not even attempt to do so, stating instead in article 1.c that it will ‘promote integrity, accountability and proper management of public affairs and public property’. In the current chapter ‘control of corruption’ is defined as the capacity of a society to constrain corrupt behaviour in order to enforce the norm of individual integrity in public service and politics and to uphold a state which is free from the capture of particular interests and thus able to promote social welfare.
fIguRE 1. ThE Balkan aChIEvERS – SIgnIfICanT ChangES In ConTRol of CoRRuPTIon In EaSTERn EuRoPE (1996-2011)
Source: World Bank, Control of Corruption from first year of measurement (1996). See: http://info.worldbank.org/
governance/wgi/mc_countries.asp.
Since they started from so low a point after the wars that accompanied the break-up of the former Yugoslavia, the Balkan countries have actually progressed on average more than other regions in the world (except for the Caribbean) in terms of the World Bank Rule of Law and Control of Corruption index. Figure 1 shows the Western Balkan coun-tries that have made statistically significant progress, compared with the only three
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new member countries which have managed the same. On a scale from one to 100, the most advanced, Estonia, is the only one in the upper quarter of good governance, hav-ing started from a far better position, but Croatia, Serbia and the former Yugoslav Re-public of Macedonia (FYROM) have made significant progress when compared to their 1996 rankings and have come to overshadow Bulgaria and Romania. Croatia, the most advanced, hovers around the rank of sixty, which is where most ‘borderline’ cases in the world are situated. A borderline case is a fairly modern state where the main norm in public resource allocation is still ‘particularism’: in other words, nepotism and corrup-tion are still the norm rather than the excepcorrup-tion.
STATE OF PLAY
So these three Western Balkan countries can be seen as achievers, although they are still far from the good governance zone in Figure 1 (above 70). Montenegro, although the youngest country, has performed similarly to FYROM and Serbia. News is less good concerning the other Western Balkan countries. Albania and Bosnia and Herzegovina have also progressed, but less.
fIguRE 2. ConTRol of CoRRuPTIon aCRoSS ThE EaSTERn anD WESTERn BalkanS
Source: D. Kaufmann, A. Kraay, and M. Mastruzzi, The Worldwide Governance Indicators: Methodology and Analytical Issues (2010)
Figure 2 (see page 37) shows how close all Balkan countries are. Slovenia is the positive outlier on top and Albania and Kosovo are the negative outliers on the bottom. This mirrors the difference in terms of economic development between the two extremes.
The core group of countries presents few differences, and in fact shares the same gov-ernance diagnosis. The main govgov-ernance institutions do not vary from the Eastern to Western Balkans, amounting to regimes based on political pluralism where victory in elections means significant spoiling of the state by the winners, ranging from the al-location of public appointments (even at minor levels) to public contracts, concessions and privatisations. This regime is dominated by clientelism (taking the various forms of patronage, pork barrel spending and networks of influence-peddling). This behaviour is the rule of the game not only in politics, but also in many business areas, where the favouritism shown by the government to certain companies seriously distorts market competition. It also pervades other aspects of public life, for instance in universities.
Open and fair competition is rare.
This is the standard portrait of all countries ranked under the threshold of 60, with the exception of Bosnia and Herzegovina, where the dividing lines of client groups are of an ethnic rather than political party nature. This also means that law enforcement agencies and the judiciary are only partly effective, with a significant number of the powerful and privileged escaping their control. Nearly all elected politicians belong to the sphere of the privileged, many of whom feel threatened by the EU’s stress on the rule of law and anticorruption measures, since this is how politics works. In other words, it is rather difficult to entrust political elites with the task of ridding their countries of corruption when it is mostly they who profit from the current arrangements: hence the low voter turnout in elections and disenchantment with all politicians in both the Eastern and Western Balkans. Successful prosecutions in Romania and Croatia have not managed so far to have a deterrent effect, although securing the convictions of former prime min-isters in these two countries is remarkable in itself.
If we compare corruption across the group of countries belonging to the same income group (using World Bank indicators), none of the Western Balkan countries fare worse than the average of their income group. The individual country’s level of development matters significantly. Poverty and an informal economy are major drivers of corruption before themselves becoming impediments to development. Any country where claim-ants are in poverty, court clerks discontented and income disparities great has difficulty establishing a judiciary capable of enforcing the law impartially and controlling corrup-tion.