Janine Wedel - Unaccountable - How Elite Power Brokers Corrupt Our Finances, Freedom, and Security

The High-Priest economists became the anointed arbiters of anti-corruption. The question was not so much what corruption was (more often than not, it was in the realm of “need” corruption), but where resources would be targeted and how an agenda would be put into action. The answers to all these questions would set up the disconnect between the anti-corruption enterprise on the one hand, and the new corruption and unaccountability that was gathering on the horizon on the other.

In the mid to late 1990s, I was a well-placed witness to see firsthand how these all-important questions would be answered, from Warsaw to Washington. As an anthropologist, I had lived and studied and was intermittently based in eastern Europe, where the World Bank debuted its first anti-corruption programs and where TI set up local chapters. I had witnessed Western aid advisers on the ground just a few years earlier—in the late 1980s and the early to mid 1990s—and observed both Collision and Collusion (the title of my book on the subject), as the West sent foreign aid and advisers to the region. 49Now anti-corruption was joining that agenda. The same lineup of aid and development bodies, from the World Bank to Western aid agencies and governments, was pursuing anti-corruption efforts in the late 1990s in many of those same countries and more. As resources were earmarked and demand for expertise on the subject grew, a slew of Western and local consultants cropped up and were put on the case. The anti-corruption industry shifted into high gear.

Indeed, corruption was an issue in the region—from the physician accepting an under-the-table payment from a patient en route to the operating room (the “gift” was now often cash, unlike in communist times) to the informal “clans” that coalesced—as communism crumbled—to control the economy, energy, and natural resources. The breakdown of authoritarian command systems with nothing comparable to replace them had put up for grabs many spoils of (communist) state-owned industries and riches. In short, opportunities for corruption of all kinds abounded—and much of it.

In the late 1990s, I joined the ranks of scholars who did stints as corruption consultants for the World Bank. In addition to participating in a Bank-sponsored assessment of corruption in a particular eastern European country, I helped develop ideas for identifying potential entry points for anti-corruption initiatives for the region. Some Bank officials working on the ground there, I found, were very astute and attuned to local realities. 50While well aware of, say, the newspaper editor-in-chief who tripled as a member of parliament and a political leader, the more typical focus of potential action seemed to be a low-paid customs official or a bureaucrat open to payments from businessmen in exchange for permits. Of course, the choice of focus is a delicate dance for the World Bank, which deals with governments, depends on their cooperation, and cannot willy-nilly pick at ruling elites without some governmental buy-in. Yet it was hard not to wince with irony when a Bank official, no doubt earning a robust six-figure salary, inquired about the possibility of moving customs officers around a country from border crossing to border crossing. That way, officers taking bribes to feed their families on otherwise paltry salaries could not collude with smugglers and border-crossers with whom they had become acquainted. And, of course, there I was myself, earning a reasonable consultant’s fee yet struggling to come up with anti-corruption prescriptions in an environment where, among local people, the subject was scarcely broached in polite company.

Later, at the tail end of the 1990s and in the early 2000s, I was based in Washington, where government agencies, from the U.S. Treasury to the U.S. Department of Justice, embarked on international anti-corruption programs. I secured a perch in the Justice Department as a research fellow.

For me, the irony never quite abated. Fighting corruption came with unimpeachable motives—much like, say, the war on cancer or providing aid to needy children. But such areas are invariably difficult to assess clear-headedly. Often, the urgency and reality of need dwarfs unblinkered analysis of where the funds actually go, how and by whom they will be used, and the immediate and long-term impact—never straightforward—of that use.

Consider, for instance, my time at Justice as a member of a U.S.-Ukrainian working group. Part of our job was to select, for U.S. funding, research projects on organized crime and corruption to be conducted by Ukrainian scholars. Supporting good research is a good idea. But nearly all the people with access to the necessary information and contacts to apply for the funding belonged to one insider group or another, almost by definition. In my on-the-ground look at foreign aid to the region, I had seen how even tiny funds (by Western standards) entrusted to a few individuals in a resource-poor environment to, say, promote civil society or democracy, often entrenched the influence of those individuals and their close-knit circle, lending them further power and influence. In this case, the money might indeed support worthwhile research; it might also reinforce existing hierarchies.

And what of our financing research on the trafficking of women (often for prostitution) while we stayed in the best Ukrainian hotels? Did not our presence, and that of many delegations like ours, help to create the demand for the heavily made-up, hot-pants-and-stiletto-clad young ladies milling around the lobby in the dead of winter?

It was easy to call out—though not so simple to stop—traffickers involved in the enslavement of women, a problem the media loved to cover because it had a certain sensational appeal. It was easy to focus on mid- and small-fry customs officers. And yet, all the while, some of the most valuable resources on earth were being acquired in the least capitalistic, least democratic fashion—by insiders—sometimes not only with the High Priests’ blessings but even with the practical help of those within their profession. The more insidious, less visible, corruption was being obscured.

THE ANTI-CORRUPTION CREED

Ideas and ideology drove, and drive, anti-corruption efforts, just as they might any such mobilization. In this case, though, the evangelizers were the High Priests and they had the holy grail. “Ethics” was scarcely in the lexicon of the prevailing economics doctrine. Yet the economists were not in the least bit reticent about sermonizing.

Their way of thinking focused on “need” corruption, with “greed” corruption hardly in the picture, as we have seen. And the High Priests suffused anti-corruption efforts with several assumptions—not always stated, acknowledged, or conscious—that emanated almost entirely from their way of thinking. In brief, they are that corruption afflicts the Other, not us; that governments, not private sectors, are the primary problems; that “smaller” government is necessarily less corrupt than “bigger” government; that corruption is nearly synonymous with bribery; and that the essence of corruption can be conveyed in country-specific, single-number scores.

My point is not that these assumptions are necessarily wrong. My point also is not that corruption, as defined by economists and the Bank-and-TI establishment as pretty much “need” corruption, is not a problem. To the contrary, as I said earlier, it is a huge problem for those who face it in many parts of the globe. My point is that, in powering anti-corruption efforts, these assumptions focused scholarship and solutions so narrowly that, by definition, the new corruption and the massive unaccountability inherent in it were excluded. It is also that these assumptions (and the approaches they bred) obscured other forms of corruption as they began to emerge, for the approaches of the anti-corruption industry diverge a full 180 degrees from the realities of the new corruption with its built-in unaccountability.