Against the Grain: How Georgia Fought Corruption and What It Means
By Johan Engvall
Published inSeptember 2012.
Introduction
Corruption has attracted the expanding attention of the development community in the past decade. With increased awareness of the detrimental effects of corruption for democracy, investment, health, welfare and gender equality, strategies to fight it have become a top priority in policy circles, and active anti-corruption programs have been promoted by a range of donor governments and international organizations. One of the main target areas has been the former Soviet Union, although this was not the case until the late 1990s as focus until then had been on dismantling the old communist system and introducing the institutions needed for building democracy and free markets. As democratization stalled and transition failed to yield the expected outcome, systemic corruption was increasingly identified as the bane of the post-communist transition.
The high level of corruption in countries undertaking the presumed transition from the Soviet state was until recently seen as an inevitable byproduct of the conversion process to modernity. Indeed, for long it was common to argue that corruption may even be the grease that helps spur economic and political modernization. However, as a new system of public institutions and bodies consolidated, corruption was expected to decline. From this conventional modernization or transition perspective, the fact that corruption in many post-Soviet countries has been growing steadily since the collapse of the Soviet system would be explained in terms of a still ongoing and incomplete transformation to a new political order. Yet contrary to the expectation of an initial surge in corruption and the gradual vanishing of corrupt practices, corruption in the post-Soviet region has over time become ever more pervasive, but also more standardized and rationalized. In other words, it has developed into a well-defined system in its own right.
The predominant view today among scholars and international organizations alike is that corruption is a crime, usually defined as “the misuse of public power for private gain.” It has been popular to apply medical metaphors of disease to the phenomenon, such as the “cancer of corruption.” From the perspective of anti-corruption strategies, this entails that rampant corruption can be localized, excised and removed from the political body. The view of corruption as a crime or violation of formal rules implies that it is a phenomenon that is essentially the same everywhere; the only major difference being a matter of degrees of corruption. However, in countries where corruption is endemic, corrupt practices cannot in any meaningful way be understood as violations of formal rules, for these practices should be understood as representing a distinct mode of social organization, i.e. a dominant norm for the organization of the state and the distribution of public goods on the basis of status, privilege, connections and money.
The insufficiency of thinking of corruption as deviant behavior becomes clear if one takes a quick look at Transparency International’s Global Corruption Barometer. Low levels of corruption are found among some countries in Western Europe, North America, the Antipodean, as well as a few isolated cases in South America, Eastern Europe and Asia. The rest of the world consists either of highly corrupt or “semi-corrupt” countries. Thus, in an international perspective, corruption is the norm, not the exception. Seen in this light of entrenched corruption as the natural state of affairs, the real puzzle is rather how some countries have managed to curb corruption.
Among international organizations that have made anti-corruption a key pillar in their development programs, there is a considerable consensus regarding how anti-corruption strategies should be formulated. The World Bank advocates a technical-instrumental approach, where the key question “is finding an appropriate entry point for anticorruption work. Given the magnitude of the tasks faced in most of these countries, it is critical to begin at a point where the goals are feasible and tangible results can be realized within a time frame that builds support for further reforms. Small gains can provide essential levers to sway public and official opinion.” Then, the task is to maximize leverage beyond the entry point in order to adopt a critical mass of mutually reinforcing reforms that step-by-step builds into a comprehensive program that is sustainable. The United Nations’ global program against corruption similarly understands reforms as a “long-term process whereby corrupt values and practices are gradually identified and eliminated.” Thus, progress should come gradually as a country slowly changes from a corrupt to a non-corrupt track. Finally, the most explicit of all international anti-corruption organizations – Transparency International – echoes this general consensus:
Instead of sweeping programs of reform, TI implements focused and specific plans of action in an incremental process. Often, the prevalence of corruption discourages individual firms or even entire nations from taking the first step toward transparency. When everyone pays bribes, no one wants to be the first to stop, thereby losing business to competitors. As an answer to this problem, TI has developed a concept called “Islands of Integrity,” whereby competing firms in a specific market enter into an AntiBribery Pact…. The “Islands of Integrity” concept is being recommended in one form or another to most countries that have entered into relationships with TI.
By looking at the type of institutional arrangements that exist in relatively non-corrupt countries, scholars and donors point to a catalog of general institutions that help protect countries from corruption. The list is endless. Yet promoting anti-corruption work based on this extensive catalog of factors has its limitations, because these factors are based on the kind of behavior and institutions that thoroughly corrupt countries lack. As Bo Rothstein astutely observes: “Instead of explaining the causes of corruption, authors in this approach have simply described how the institutional systems in corrupt and non-corrupt countries differ.” In short, despite the substantial amount of intellectual and financial attention paid to the problem of corruption and the development of anti-corruption programs, the outcomes are highly mixed. On the one hand, the huge anti-corruption industry has undeniably been enormously successful in raising awareness and improving the collection of data on corruption all over the world. On the other hand, the hard fact is that the many attempts to implement concrete and sustainable anti-corruption programs have not had the desired effect. Paradoxically, some countries subject to a decade of anti-corruption efforts appear to have become even more corrupt. It has, for example, been observed how corruption levels in African countries have been resistant despite sustained programs designed in order to reduce corruption.15 High levels of corruption also persist in the former Soviet republics despite substantial resources being spent on combating it. To give but one illustration, fighting corruption has been an essential component in Kyrgyzstan in stepwise reform programs in certain sectors of the state such as the judiciary, the police, revenue administration and economic investment sponsored by organizations like the USAID, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), the Asian Development Bank (ADB), the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), but ultimately the level of corruption has increased rather than decreased if survey evidence is to be believed.
Nonetheless, there is one country that demonstrates a break with the general trend of corruption in post-Soviet societies as ever more entrenched and standardized: Georgia after 2003. At the time of that year’s Rose Revolution, Transparency International’s Global Corruption Barometer ranked Georgia as the most corrupt post-Soviet country (124th of 133 countries). However, since the revolution, something dramatic has taken place. In 2011, Georgia ranked as the least corrupt post-Soviet country outside the Baltics, and ahead of several EU member states (64th of 188 countries). The country further ranked first in the world in terms of the relative decrease in corruption levels and second in terms of the government’s effectiveness in fighting corruption. Less than three percent of the population said they had to pay a bribe during the last year, which places the country alongside the U.S. and several Western European countries in this respect. These results are consistent with surveys conducted by other organizations, for example the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD), the World Bank and the Caucasus Research Resource Centers.
Thus, something has undoubtedly changed in Georgia in the past decade and there is a largely untold story of what has really happened regarding curbing corruption in the country. Given that it has been increasingly noticed that corruption, once it has taken root, is very difficult to eradicate and that contemporary success stories are very few,22 the turn of events in Georgia during such a short period of time raises several important questions that this report seeks to address. What made this dramatic change possible? Did Georgia follow existing anti-corruption advice? What does the Georgian experience mean for our assumptions about fighting corruption in a broader post-Soviet, or even in a global perspective? In short, undertaking an examination of Georgia’s anti-corruption strategy may potentially hold significant implications for anti-corruption policies in general and the postSoviet region in particular.
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