Paperback(First Edition, 1)
-
PICK UP IN STORECheck Availability at Nearby Stores
Available within 2 business hours
Related collections and offers
Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781843310655 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Anthem Press |
| Publication date: | 09/01/2002 |
| Series: | Anthem Studies in Development and Globalization Series |
| Edition description: | First Edition, 1 |
| Pages: | 264 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.10(w) x 9.20(h) x 1.00(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Public Corruption
The Dark Side of Social Evolution
By Robert Neild
Wimbledon Publishing Company
Copyright © 2002 Robert NeildAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-85728-758-8
CHAPTER 1
Introduction
The typical reaction to the mention of corruption, at least of an Englishman of my generation, has been to ask why it is occurring and what can be done about it. We have implicitly assumed that the absence of corruption is normal in two senses: in the moral sense that people generally know that society should be regulated by established rules of the kind we take for granted; and in the statistical sense that most people obey those rules. The corrupt are a deviant minority, like naughty children in a well-ordered school: we must see why they are being naughty and do something about it.
Many years ago I was persuaded in a conversation with Gunnar Myrdal, the Swedish social scientist, that one should try turning this approach on its head. If you look at history and across the world today you will see that it is uncorrupt government that is exceptional - and never totally attainable. For much of recorded history, societies have not been governed by rules of the kind we take for granted today. Rulers have been arbitrary and capricious. Where there have been rules, they have not normally been honestly enforced or closely observed. Most of history consists of the pursuit of power by whatever combination of physical force, tricks and deals seemed most effective to rulers and to their rivals. That has been the way of the world. Practices that we now call corrupt have been accepted as normal. The achievement of what I, for the moment, shall loosely call 'clean government' came a bout remarkably recently in a small group of countries: in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in northwestern Europe - with ramifications in the colonies. Whether there was ever clean government in earlier times is a question I leave aside.
What I believe should be studied is what caused government to become relatively clean in this group of countries at this time. There are two questions to be considered. First, what were the political conditions that produced the pursuit of cleaner government? Second, what were the means by which it was achieved?
If we could begin to get answers to these questions, we might be in a better position to understand corruption in various parts of the world today and see which processes of political development and governmental reform may produce evolution towards cleaner government; and we might be better equipped to identify processes that destroy clean government. In short, to understand corruption and how to tackle it, try studying why and how it was ever suppressed.
It is a huge subject, which could absorb the minds of teams of historians and social scientists for a long time. Working on my own in retirement, I have had to be exploratory; I have had to rely for material on the work of others rather than dig into original sources. I am not a professional historian. The result is an essay - or a set of connected essays - in the literal sense of 'a first attempt in learning'. The conclusions I propose are tentative and limited. My object is to encourage others to address the problem. I should love to see others put me right and carry the subject further - or suggest how that might be done.
The order of the work is this. Having suggested some general hypotheses, in particular that military competition used to be important in inducing improvements in the efficiency of government, I look briefly at how standards of government evolved in France, Prussia/ Germany and the United States in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; and more fully, at what happened in Britain in that period. I have chosen these four countries both because their history is accessible and because of the different incidence of military competition on them. I devote a chapter to the evolution in the same four countries of independent judiciaries, since that independence is a vital ingredient in the achievement of uncorrupt government, and it is convenient to compare in one chapter the experience of the four countries in this domain.
I then turn to the twentieth century and suggest that since the start of the Cold War military competition has changed radically and become damaging rather than helpful to uncorrupt government. Moreover, in the latter part of the century, the ability of traditional national institutions to uphold standards has been challenged by international and national developments, including a cult of personal greed and hostility to government. I again focus on what ha s happened in Britain. After a wave of scandals at the beginning of the twentieth century, standards appear to have risen, reaching a peak in the Second World War, only to decline again and give way to another wave of scandals at the end of the twentieth century. The nineteenth century apparatus for relatively uncorrupt government, which relied heavily on the sense of honour of elites, was then being eroded and, as regards the civil service, was emasculated in the name of efficiency. The response to the scandals has principally been to establish new bodies to monitor behaviour and report, but not as a rule to prosecute miscreants. The result is a shift towards a 'cops and robbers' approach to the prevention of corruption with the cops unarmed. That there has been a shift of this kind is, in part at least, an understandable consequence of the Thatcher-Blair policy of seeking to remodel the economy and society of Britain on American lines.
CHAPTER 2General
The Definition of Corruption
I shall concentrate on public corruption, meaning corruption by politicians and public officials of all kinds, including the judiciary. This is the area with respect to which the evidence is best and with which I am most familiar. But I shall also refer to private corruption since it is closely linked to public corruption: corrupt acts by public officials are usually deals with private citizens; and in societies where there is much public corruption there will usually be much private corruption; they tend to go together.
When we talk today of public corruption we mean bribery, nepotism, the sale of offices and jobbery in the appointment of public officials; we mean offences by politicians and public officials in such matters as the collection of taxation, the granting of contracts and the granting of cash benefits; and we mean fraud, bribery and other types of mal-practice connected with elections, which benefit an individual or his party. In short, we mean the breaking of the rules, be they written laws or implicit codes of conduct, which we expect public officials and politicians to observe in the conduct of public affairs.
As soon as one starts examining the history of public corruption one sees that the nature of the activities that are held to be corrupt has changed with time and has differed from one part of the world to another, in step with differences in the rules governing society. For example, it was normal practice for government ministers in England in the eighteenth century to lend out the public funds belonging to their departments and pocket the interest. Those practices were attacked; increasingly, they were called corrupt. As the attack succeeded, tighter rules of conduct were introduced and the meaning of corruption changed, becoming wider. To allow for this, I shall define public corruption, in this study, as follows:
The breaking by public persons, for the sake of private financial or political gain, of the rules of conduct in public affairs prevailing in a society in the period under consideration.
The amount of corruption in any society will depend on the gap between:
(a) the number of decisions to be made by public persons (which, given the size of the society, will depend on the extent of government) and
(b) the extent to which those decisions a re made dishonestly, i.e. influenced by the prospect of private gain.
At first I was tempted to think there might be a simple relationship between the extent of government and the rate of corruption: that with more government and consequently more rules, there would tend to be a higher rate of corruption. But a moment's consideration of history shows that this is often not so. For example, the reduction in corruption and the great improvement in the quality of government in Britain in the latter part of the nineteenth century went hand in hand with an extension in the scope of government; they were both part of a general wave of reform. The introduction of new measures to improve education, public hygiene, factory conditions, the government of India and many other things, generated pressure for better administration and led to reform; and the utilitarian-cum-evangelical ethos of reform was conducive to the observance of rules. More generally, the improvements in government in northwestern Europe in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, which in the Introduction I described as the emergence of 'clean government', consisted of positive changes in both variables: new rules were introduced which forbade practices that previously were permitted, and the enforcement of rules was improved. Conversely, a policy of trying in a heavily governed country to reduce the scope of government, and hence the number of rules that have to be enforced, may be accompanied by denigration of the public service and by cuts in its pay and conditions of such severity that, in combination with an idealization of private gain, it may produce an increase rather than a decrease in the rate of corruption. Russia today is an example.
Of course, in those countries, principally in the Third World, that have limited capacity for government and yet attempt to enforce complex economic regulations, there is good reason to expect that corruption might be reduced by cutting back on regulation - provided it could be achieved without conducting a political attack on government and public persons that equally damaged the capacity for enforcement.
Clearly there is no general law as to the relationship between the extent of government and the rate of corruption. To understand what has happened we must look widely at the total evolution of those societies we wish to study; and we must recognize that there is likely to be complex causation in which many social and political variables interact and move at the same time: for example, the tide may flow towards better government, with honesty breeding honesty and then, perhaps after a long period, it may flow in the other direction with corruption breeding corruption. It is best to start from the view that anything can happen.
Some implications of the notion that the evolution of corruption depends on the relationship between changes in rules and changes in their observance are worth noting at this stage. An outburst of corruption does not necessarily mean that the standards of conduct of a society have become 'worse'. It may mean that new rules have been introduced, which demand higher standards of conduct than before and these are being resisted, in which case, the outcome, i.e. the new average standard of conduct, may be judged to be better than that which went before. In other words, new corruption round new rules may be an improvement on old corruption round old rules. For example, when in England at the end of the nineteenth century the introduction of electoral reforms stopped the sale of parliamentary seats and the bribery of electors, there was no law forbidding political parties from gathering money centrally and spending it on propaganda campaigns in the newly developed national press, nor on other means of rallying the electorate. In no time the rival political parties began to compete for money before elections; prime ministers, starting, surprisingly, with Gladstone, began to sell Honours, a practice for which Lloyd George became notorious and which subsequent prime ministers have not eschewed. Thus a new form of corruption replaced the old, but England's electoral system is generally judged to have been better after it was reformed than it had been before.
In other cases the introduction of new rules may induce more corruption than the rules are worth, causing a decline in the quality of government. This has often happened in Third World countries where governments have introduced complex economic restrictions, the manipulation of which has been profitable to public and private persons - and damaging to the economy.
In yet other cases, corruption may increase not because there has been any change in the rules of a society but because public and private moral standards have fallen following, perhaps, the accession to power of a bad ruler; or, conversely, corruption may decline following the accession of a good ruler.
It is self-evident that there will always be corruption. For there is always a temptation to break rules for the sake of economic or other gains - unless the rules are redundant, meaning that no one sees advantage in breaking them - and one can be sure that a fraction, large or small, of any population will yield to that temptation. It is true that those of us who grew up, as I did, in a society where there was little public corruption acquired the habit, wrongly, of thinking and speaking of our countries as not corrupt without qualification. Laziness of thought and expression is partly to blame. But there are other causes. One is that public corruption harms the community as a whole rather than individuals who might quickly protest at the damage they suffer. Hence it will not be noticed until it is exposed: like many diseases, it can exist invisibly. Another ca use, which I suspect is important, is esprit de corps: we don't like to admit that there is anything wrong in the school, the college, the army, the civil service, the judiciary or the country to which we belong because to do so would be to blemish the reputation of that institution and therefore our own standing in the world. It might mean damaging the reputation of a colleague or colleagues, contrary to the spirit of loyalty that a good institution achieves and needs to achieve. Moreover, to admit that corruption exists may have the effect of causing those who are tempted to misbehave to yield to that temptation, saying, 'We all know others do it and get away with it, why shouldn't we?' Denial, whatever its cause, may serve in some degree as a means of enforcement, probably a dangerous one since it may cause us to avert our eyes for too long from evidence of corruption. In addition, denial may have a counterpart in a tendency to label as corrupt, without qualification, countries where corruption is acknowledged to be substantial. We must avoid black and white classification.
We must also recognize that the changing frontier between what in any country is regarded as corrupt and what is regarded as uncorrupt is likely at any time to look arbitrary and inconsistent. It will be the product of laws and conventions that have been, and are being, pushed this way and that as society evolves. Nor should we blindly condemn apparent inconsistencies. For example, it is not necessarily undesirable that, as is the case in Britain today, judicial appointments are made by patronage rather than by open competition or election, and contracts are not always awarded to the lowest bidder.
An Analytical Framework
I shall start from three broad propositions:
1. Changes in the quality of government, i.e. rules and their enforcement, will take place only if rulers introduce them.
2. Politicians whose prime aim is to gain office will not advocate reforms unless they believe that by so doing they will improve, or at least not damage, their prospects of acquiring power.
3. Once in power, rulers, regardless of how they got there - whether by inheritance, force or election - and regardless of what they promised in election campaigns, will not introduce reforms unless they believe that by so doing they will improve, or at least not damage, their chances of retaining or enhancing their power.
There have, of course, been exceptions to narrow power- seeking behaviour. Gladstone and Attlee come to mind. But they have been rare products of unusual social settings.
As soon as you consider these propositions and think about history, it is difficult to see how cleaner government ever came about. Indeed, you are confronted by a puzzle. For if, as is the case, government used to be 'dirty', meaning that those who sought power pursued it by killing their rivals and enlisting supporters by offering the prospect of jobs, wealth and a share in power; if, in other words, the pursuit of power was largely unconstrained and was based on what the sociologists call 'patron-client' relationships, how on earth did anyone gain power, or retain it, by renouncing the traditional 'dirty' methods and being clean? If anyone had tried being clean, would he not at once have been at a disadvantage, vis-à-vis his dirty rivals, and lost supporters, or been poisoned? Think how Shakespeare portrayed the pursuit of power in his plays. Yet somehow clean government did come about. How?
After reading a lot of modern history, looking for the causes of the improvements in government of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, I see a tangle of politico-social forces operating in different ways within each country; and, standing out from these, one powerful force, military competition, which is external to each country and has operated upon each with a strength determined by its strategic location.
Social Forces
The principal social forces that stand out are the Enlightenment, religion and the pursuit of efficiency.
So much has been written about the Enlightenment that I shall simply take it as a stylized fact that in the eighteenth and the first half of the nineteenth century, European rulers were faced by a tide of intellectual criticism, by the terrifying example of the French Revolution, and then by powerful popular demands for reform sweeping across Europe and accompanied by widespread uprisings. These threats to established rule and the ideas underlying them were a potent force making for improvements in the quality of government.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Public Corruption by Robert Neild. Copyright © 2002 Robert Neild. Excerpted by permission of Wimbledon Publishing Company.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Ch1 - Introduction; Ch2 - General; Ch3 - Prussia/Germany; Ch4 - France; Ch5 - The United States; Ch6 - Britain in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries; Ch7 - Britain's Indian Connection; Ch8 - The Evolution of Independent Judiciaries; Ch9 - The Twentieth Century; Ch10 - Britain in the First Half of the Twentieth Century; Ch11 - Britain in the Second Half of the Twentieth Century; Ch12 - Recapitulation and Conclusion; Appendices; Notes; IndexWhat People are Saying About This
'Anyone who is concerned about the mounting epidemic of global corruption should read this original and forthright book.' —Anthony Sampson, author of 'The Arms Bazaar'