*Topicality/Definitions Democracy Promotion Includes Military Intervention
Anti-Corruption Efforts Fail: External Pressure Counterproductive
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- DONOR-DRIVEN ANTI-CORRUPTION AGENDA AND CONDITIONALITY IGNORES THE NEED FOR THE WILL TO CHANGE TO COME FROM WITHIN NOT BE IMPOSED
- FOCUSING ANTI-CORRUPTION EFFORTS ON DEVELOPING COUNTRIES UNDERMINES THEIR LEGITIMACY
- EXTERNALLY IMPOSED ANTI-CORRUPTION EFFORTS FAIL DUE TO A LACK OF PUBLIC LEGITIMACY
- WEAK AND INEFFECTIVE ANTI-CORRUPTION PROGRAMS UNDERMINE PUBLIC SUPPORT FOR SERIOUS ANTI-CORRUPTION EFFORTS IN THE FUTURE
- SANCTIONS-BASED CORRUPTION CAMPAIGNS INEFFECTIVE – MUST FOCUS ON INSTITUTIONAL REFORM TO INCREASE ACCOUNTABILITY
- PRESSURING NEW DEMOCRACIES TO CONSOLIDATE POLITICAL REFORMS COUNTERPRODUCTIVE
- EXTERNAL PRESSURE ENCOURAGES SHALLOW REFORMSAND SHAM DEMOCRACY
- GOOD GOVERNANCE PROMOTION COUNTERPRODUCTIVE – UNDERMINES STATE CAPACITY
- GOOD GOVERNANCE AND ACCOUNTABILITY INITIATIVES COUNTERPRODUCTIVE – UNDERMINES POLITICAL CAPACITY OF THE RECIPIENT
- ATTEMPT TO IMPOSE GOOD GOVERNANCE EXTERNALLY COUNTERPRODUCTIVE
Anti-Corruption Efforts Fail: External Pressure CounterproductiveEXTERNAL PRESSURE FOR ANTI-CORRUPTION REFORM COUNTERPRODUCTIVE – CREATES NEW FORMS OF CORRUPTION Morris Szeftel, Politics and International Studies-University of Leeds, 2000, Review of African Political Economy 84: 287–306, p. 287-8 The weak bargaining position of African states, where debt and underdevelopment make dependence on international creditors and aid donors especially acute, has led to a variety of direct, unsubtle pressures to force these states to undertake ‘governance’ reforms. While many of these measures address important problems undermining African development, they also misunderstand the nature of corruption as an African problem in two important ways. First, they seek to impose rules and norms of proper public behavior, developed for and within liberal democracies, in environments where liberal democracy is not established. And, second, they threaten the dependence of the African petty bourgeoisie on access to the state and its resources. In the context of underedevelopment, local accumulation rests heavily on political power and the ability it provides to appropriate public resources. Corruption provides a means of transferring public resources to the new middle class and bourgeois strata which emerged in the post-colonial order. And underdevelopment ensures that dependence on political power for accumulation is continuous. Africa’s development crisis has intensified dependence on the political domain even more and increased conflict as claimants fight over a diminishing pool of resources. Far from arresting the upward spiral of corruption, liberalization and governance measures imposed by the donors have encouraged the development of new forms of corruption. DONOR-DRIVEN ANTI-CORRUPTION AGENDA AND CONDITIONALITY IGNORES THE NEED FOR THE WILL TO CHANGE TO COME FROM WITHIN NOT BE IMPOSED Elizabeth Harrison, Anthropology Lecturer University of Sussex, 2004, Between Morality and the Law: corruption, anthropology, and comparative society, ed. I. Pardo, p. 145 Chabal’s (1996) argument that the tendency to seek explanations in “the nature of things African” reflects the West’s own crisis of identity is obviously hard to prove. Of equal relevance may be the pressures of time and money that demand simple solutions to be easily put into action. Donor solutions take three principal forms: a certain amount of attention to in-house corruption, imposing anti-corruption conditionalities, and support for projects promoting governance in both the state and civil society organizations. The second two are portrayed as especially important.
Mlada Bukovansky, Professor of Government, Smith College, 2002, ‘Corruption is bad: normative dimensions of the anti-corruption movement’, Australian National University Working Paper, 2002/5, p. 22-3 In this vein, another problem of the economic and institutional rationales for the anti-corruption regime is that such rationales implicitly confine the problem of corruption to the “developing world”, since if corruption hurts “development”, the already “developed” countries presumably do not have much to worry about. But the strongest economies in the world today experienced (and still experience) widespread corruption. Further, such countries host multinational corporations that are perceived to actively contribute to corruption in emerging markets by providing the supply-side of the cross-border briber equation. Thus, to implicitly confine the problem of corruption to the developing world undermines the legitimacy of the anti-corruption regime.
Mlada Bukovansky, Professor of Government, Smith College, 2002, ‘Corruption is bad: normative dimensions of the anti-corruption movement’, Australian National University Working Paper, 2002/5, p. 35-6 The emergence of a global anti-corruption regime, supported by dominant states and international institutions, implies a consensus that governments ought to protect the public good and thus foster public trust, and that international institutions can help them do so, either by helping governments coordinate their efforts to constrain private actors from giving bribes (as in the OECD regime), providing advice and incentives regarding institutional reform, or in general by “teaching” the proper norms to more recalcitrant governments. These options appear to assume that target governments have the capacity – or can be pressured by a vital “civil society” –to institute reforms congruent with the concepts of public trust, accountability, and transparency. All this raises the difficult question of whether anti-corruption measures emanating from international institutions – especially those measures imposed by dominant states on weaker ones – can actually have such an effect. Put another way, can public trust be imposed from without the polity, or from the top-down, or must it also develop from within and from the bottom-up? If the latter, can international institutions have a role that is not limited to external imposition of alien values? Without central enforcement mechanisms, the success of international anti-corruption efforts will disproportionately depend on the perceived legitimacy of those efforts among the target communities – which include not only developing states but also industrialized states and the international business community. Anti-corruption efforts take place in public, and draw their strength from public approval as well as governmental institutional reform and corporate codes of conduct. Thus, such efforts should involve strengthening the authority of the public sphere by facilitating discourse and action in multiple and diverse communities. International institutions and non-governmental organizations can have a role in this process, as some of Transparency International’s work demonstrates. WEAK AND INEFFECTIVE ANTI-CORRUPTION PROGRAMS UNDERMINE PUBLIC SUPPORT FOR SERIOUS ANTI-CORRUPTION EFFORTS IN THE FUTURE Franklin Steves and Alan Rousso, European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, 2003, "Anti-Corruption Programmes in Post-Communist Transition Countries and Changes in the Business Environment, 1999-2002" EBRD Working Paper No. 85, December, SSRN, p. 2 In many transition countries, the development and implementation of anti-corruption programmes are still at an early stage. But because these programmes have become the focal point of anti-corruption efforts in many countries of the region, it is important to continually assess their impact on different dimensions of corruption and to adjust these strategies accordingly. Anti-corruption programmes that prove ineffective in achieving demonstrable results in a reasonable time frame or, in the worst case, that serve as a rhetorical cover for government inaction undermine public confidence in all future government anti-corruption efforts. Consequently, frequent tracking of the progress and performance of anti-corruption programmes is critical. SANCTIONS-BASED CORRUPTION CAMPAIGNS INEFFECTIVE – MUST FOCUS ON INSTITUTIONAL REFORM TO INCREASE ACCOUNTABILITY Kempe Ronald Hope. Center for Graduate Studies, Atlanta University, 1987, Corruption and Reform, 2:127-147, p. 143-4 Dealing with corruption through comprehensive administrative reform can have a greater positive impact than piecemeal measures to simply punish wrongdoers. However desirable punishment may be, it is merely a means of satisfying a social demand for retribution. It is not a deterrent and never has been. The best anticorruption campaigns must emphasize the creation and maintenance of a moral and accountable administration. This can only be accomplished through the mechanism of administrative reform. The capacity of a nation’s political system to prevent, detect, and control the abuse of power is of major significance here since, in the final analysis, ethical and accountable behavior among public servants is a reflection of similar behavior among the political leaders. Public officials in developing states will only accept the challenge to live up to the highest standards when codes of behavior that enhance ethical conduct are exemplified and enforced. PRESSURING NEW DEMOCRACIES TO CONSOLIDATE POLITICAL REFORMS COUNTERPRODUCTIVE Joan M. Nelson & Stephanie J. Eglinton, Overseas Development Council, 1993, Global Goals, Contentious Means: issues of multiple aid conditionality, p. 53-4 Especially in fragile democracies, the use of conditioned aid to press for new or old objectives raises an additional dilemma for donors. In newly democratic countries, participants in politics—parties, interest groups, ordinary citizens, and government officials—are just beginning to learn the rules of constructive public participation in policy decisions. Many participants doubt that democratic procedures will work—that is, will give them any voice in decisions that affect their lives. In such circumstances, strong external pressures—above all, pressure on how to further consolidate political reforms—interferes with the consolidation process itself. Outside interference diminishes the credibility and legitimacy of democratic procedures, even if the specific goal of the conditionality is praiseworthy. In new democracies, it is particularly important that the people of the country not only own the goal, but also that they control the process of decisionmaking. EXTERNAL PRESSURE ENCOURAGES SHALLOW REFORMSAND SHAM DEMOCRACY Peter Uvin, World Hunger Program, Brown University, 1993, Political Conditionality, ed. Georg Sorensen, p. 72-3 In extreme cases, the exercise of political conditionality can even have the reverse effect of the one intended, by rallying part of the population around the powers that be. This can be said more or less to have happened in the cases of Iraq, Morocco, Indonesia and Kenya – at least with the administrative-intellectual-urban segments of society: in most Third World countries the large majority of the population has far less attachment to abstract principles such as national sovereignty and non-interference than to the end of poverty and exploitation, but its voice is rarely heard. Second, confronted with the pressures emanating from the aid system, governments that have no real intention of reforming their policies can easily evade any political conditionality. It is indeed most difficult to monitor and progress in the fields of human rights or democracy: what a government does with the right hand, it can undo with the left. Thus governments from recipient countries under pressure to reform their political practices can act like democratizing by liberating some political prisoners, legalizing some newspapers, co-opting some ‘opposition’ politicians, and the like, but without any change in their political system in favor of a real sharing of power. This way, if done well, a government can satisfy the demands from the donor countries while keeping intact the degree of oppression and mismanagement it judges necessary for its maintenance in power or for any other objective it has (the exclusion from power of a social, religious, ethnic group, for example). Hence, we suddenly hear dictators that came to power through arms and remained there for years, if not decades, through violence and manipulation, such as Habiranyama of Rwanda, Deby of Chad, Ould Chadda of Mauritania, Houphuet-Boigny of Ivory Coast, explain with a straight face to Western audiences their sudden conversion to the virtues of democracy – after which the foreign aid tap is usually opened again by the former colonial powers and the other main donors, only too happy to continue business-as-usual. In the meantime, the discrimination against ethnic groups, torture, intimidation, or even ethnic unrest instigated by the government continue as before. The regular occurrence of this outcome in Africa can be partially explained by the fact that, in most African countries, there are no powerful groups in favor of democracy. Fundamentally, neither the government nor the national bourgeoisie sens largo nor the army nor even, often, the opposition (see the cases of Zaire or Chad as the most dramatic ones), are attached to Western-style democracy. Moreover, there do not exist in many cases in Africa large segments of the population that are well organized and militant in favor of democracy, as are sometimes found in Latin America or Asia. Politics is usually the privilege of a very small percentage of the population; the large, “silent majority” – farmers, urban poor – are totally excluded from it. The exercise of political conditionality from abroad cannot change these facts and, in the best cases, risks bringing about only cosmetic changes, replacing some of the faces at the top, but continuing to exclude the majority of the population from meaningful participation in the social and political life of their societies. Finally, unwilling governments can always turn themselves to other bilateral or multilateral donors so as to bypass a too insistent donor; if they are able to do so, they can also address themselves to the international capital market, which is even less attentive than the aid system, as China has been able to do after the Tiananmen massacre. The cold war being over, the options has certainly decreased, but it would be surprising that options no longer exist, or that new ones would not come into being. At present, among those donors willing to close their eyes to any human rights violation if this is convenient for their foreign policy or commercial interests, we find China, Israel, Libya, but also France and the US who still display much of their old behavior. GOOD GOVERNANCE PROMOTION COUNTERPRODUCTIVE – UNDERMINES STATE CAPACITY Olav Stokke, Norwegian Institute of International Affairs, 1995, Aid and Political Conditionality, ed. Olav Stokke, p. 28 Martin Doornbos argues that one effect of the various external initiatives and involvements in promoting “good governance” might, paradoxically, be to reduce rather than strengthen Third World governments’ capacity for policy-making and implementation as a consequence of their loss of policy initiative. I tend to agree with this analysis. Aid strategies and forms therefore matters; the best strategy is probably to support endogenously driven initiatives towards “good governance.”
Olav Stokke, Norwegian Institute of International Affairs, 1995, Aid and Political Conditionality, ed. Olav Stokke, p. 65-6 The discussion has so far centered around the probability that aid conditionality will work. A more fundamental question would be: if it works, would it work vis-à-vis the overall development objectives set for aid? There will certainly be more than one view on this issue. Martin Doornbos gives a timely warning that one paradoxical effect of the various external initiatives promoting “good governance,” is that Third World governments’ capacity for policy-making and implementation is reduced rather than strengthened, for a variety of reasons. The cost of enhancing external accountability might be a progressive erosion of policy-making capacity.
Martin Doornbos, Institute of Social Studies-The Hague, 1995, Aid and Political Conditionality, ed. Olav Stokke, p. 388 The specific role and position of the state structure within or vis-à-vis civil society varies significantly according to societal and cultural context and it is only natural that in varying contexts there will be vast differences in the way these relationships are structured or restructured. In the words of Denis-Constant Martin: “There is no standard formula for fostering an acceptable level of state management and good governance; the road to such a destination is mapped out by cultural factors that vary considerably from place to place and are in no way unalterable; on the contrary, they keep changing under the pressure of both internal and external dynamics, which makes it all the more difficult to define them.” The current package of policy prescriptions for “good governance” appears to ignores these basic problems and fails to offer any answer to them. Again, this is why it is quite conceivable that externally devised and a priori standard models for organizing government structures, which by their nature cannot take into account specific state-society relations, may have a negative rather than a positive effect. “All things considered, it is most unlikely that good governance can be introduced from outside.”
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