“The rule of law and control of corruption are nearly synonymous.” 

By Alina Mungiu-Pippidi, published by Foreign Policy on May 24, 2016

“Without rule of law, attempts to reign in corruption through legal mechanisms will only be captured by the corrupt system in place,” writes Alina Mungiu-Pippidi, a Romanian and European expert in anti-corruption in this commentary for Foreign Policy. “The rule of law and control of corruption are nearly synonymous,” she continues, noting that the defeat of corruption will not be achieved “by importing legal silver bullets from abroad.” It is a political process, she says, facilitated “through a mix of policies advanced by domestic advocates.”

Highlights from Mungiu-Pippidi’s commentary: the successful strategies of countries that have curbed the menace of corruption.

Institutions are not the answer.

“… many corrupt countries can today boast of tough anti-corruption legislation, but it rarely seems to be doing much good.” What has worked? A “reduction in opportunities for rent-seeking (less red tape or barriers to trade, more fiscal transparency) combined with effective public scrutiny and collective action to sanction corrupt behavior.” The kicker: “Without active citizens, free journalists, and independent judges, control of corruption is impossible.”

But it is “entirely possible,” says Mungiu-Pippidi, “to quantify just how successful a particular country has been when it comes to controlling corruption” through the measure of six components: freedom of the press, digital empowerment of citizens, independence of the judiciary, red tape, fiscal transparency, and trade openness.

The best approach for international donors is to help local coalitions for integrity in corrupt countries reach the point where corrupt leaders find themselves compelled to leave power — and where those who succeed them find it impossible to repeat their predecessors’ bad behavior.

One can meaningfully talk about corruption as an aberration from normal government — as something that can be controlled through legal mechanisms — only when the state is largely independent from private interests. Such states, where the rule of law predominates, exist in imperfect form in only about fifty countries.

In the rest, corruption is not abnormal. It is a form of governance in its own right — one in which public budgets, banks, and law enforcement are controlled by ruling elites who openly flaunt lavish houses, cars, and incomes worth far more than their declared earnings. In such countries, the privileged do not have to go to some exotic island to hide their money. While visiting Crimea in 2004, I saw an actual castle a local Communist party leader had built for himself in the yard of a gas station he had managed to privatize. Systemically corrupt countries have their very own Virgin Islands within their own borders.

Continue reading at the publisher’s website here

Alina Mungiu-Pippidi is the author of The Quest for Good Governance: How Societies Develop Control of Corruption published by Cambridge University Press in 2015.