From Unaccountable (Janina Wedel, 2014) p86-7
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 US. 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 night 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 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 of thinking. In brief, they are that corruption afflicts the Other, not that governments, not private sectors, are the primary problems; that “smaller” government is necessarily less corrupt than “bigger” government; fat corruption is nearly synonymous with bribery; and that the essence of corruption can be conveyed in country-specific, single-number scores. My point also is not that these assumptions are necessarily wrong. My point 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, such 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.
The Patient Is the Other
The most important thing to know about any patient is that the patient is sick. In the language of economists and the anti-corruption industry, many Second and Third World countries were very sick. The entire enterprise embraced this underlying assumption.
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