The origin story of global anti-corruption governance reads like a heroic quest for justice and transparency. It is a reassuring story of liberal triumphalism. It is a cautionary tale for corrupt public officials and governments. It is a shameful reminder for the corrupt countries of the Global South to upend their ways and join the peaceful yellow of the North on Transparency International ’s (TI) world map. It is also a story that in most academic literature occupies an introductory paragraph. It is a story that, albeit uplifting, deserves little thought.
This book looks into an aspect of the global governance of corruption that was previously considered unworthy of scholarly attention. To the extent that global anti-corruption efforts prior to the mid-1990s were mentioned, it was usually as a brief note on a ‘false start’. The lack of attention to the intergovernmental talks, that by the mid-1990s were ongoing for 25 years, has led to some persistent myths in the origin story of global anti-corruption governance. One of these myths is that TI and the World Bank were pioneers in the process. The founding of TI in the early 1990s and the acclaimed Wolfensohn speech on the ‘cancer of corruption’ in 1996 were events much more visible than the workings of ad hoc groups and confidential intergovernmental talks, and it was the former, rather than the latter, that came to symbolize the new era of global anti-corruption efforts.
In addition to the ‘founding fathers’ myth, another persistent myth in the origin story of global corruption is that there was no conflict on the definition of a global corruption problem. On the contrary, the social construction of a global corruption problem was ridden with strife, and in the process of contention, corruption became subject to a radical metamorphosis. Corruption was transformed from corporate abuse of power in the 1970s to government abuse of power in the 1990s. The trope of the corrupt corporation came to be supplanted by the tropes of the corrupt politician, corrupt public official and corrupt country. In the process, the blame for corruption was shifted from developed countries (and their corporations) to the developing countries (and their governments). As the current study aims to show, the nature of global problems is not devoid of power struggles and battles for meaning. Shaping governance responses to global problems also means shaping the world.
What makes this study distinctive is that it is the first International Relations (IR) monograph to systematically examine the rise of corruption as a global governance problem from the 1970s onward. While many articles and studies tackle the question tangentially (Naim 1995; Elliott 1997; McCoy and Heckel 2001; Bukovansky 2002; Krastev 2004; Pieth 2007; Jakobi 2013), this book puts the question of how corruption rose and developed as a global governance issue in the center of investigation. As the book argues, this gap in the literature is due to a significant extent to the lack of theoretical and methodological tools in IR that can trace the development of global social problems. In sociological research on the contrary, the study of the emergence of (national) social problems has a long research pedigree (Spector and Kitsuse 2009). The book offers a sociological approach for the study of problems in IR and makes a contribution to the constructivist agenda in IR by showing how sociological models for the study of social problems are applicable to international politics. Using the case of corruption, the book shows how global problems are negotiated and constructed and how global governance structures have emerged from them. The findings presented in the book are based on previously unexamined archival sources from the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and the United Nations (UN) which would be of interest to academics and anti-corruption practitioners but also to a wider audience of readers to which it would also provide a glimpse into the work of international organizations that usually appear as black boxes to the general public.
Since the mid-1990s, the topic of corruption has started to dominate the global policy agenda; corruption has increasingly been understood as a global policy problem that cannot be adequately tackled within the jurisdictional boundaries of the nation state. In the period 1994–1997, corruption as a global problem entered a stage of institutionalization after the formal introduction of the subject in a number of regional organizations such as the Organization of American States (OAS), the Council of Europe (CoE) and the European Union (EU). Yet, the formal agreements produced by these organizations as well as the OECD and the UN appear to have failed at ameliorating corruption across the globe. In academic research, this post-institutionalization phase is also referred to as a ‘legitimacy crisis’ stage and has produced a shift from the study of corruption to the study of anti-corruption work across different fields, in particular political science, sociology and social anthropology (Krastev 2004; Haller and Shore 2005; Sampson 2005; Bracking 2007; Roden 2010; Brown and Cloke 2011). The legitimacy crisis that counter-corruption measures have entered has led scholars in these disciplines to question the definition, scope and ways to tackle corruption internationally and has paradoxically revived issues that were hotly debated at international organizations prior to institutionalization.
The book offers new ways of thinking about corruption by examining the two distinct ways in which policy approaches and discourse on corruption developed in the UN and the OECD . One of these approaches extrapolated bribery as the main form of corrupt practices and advocated a single-actor, limited scope offense, while the other approach tackled the broader structure of the global economic system and the increasing power of transnational corporations. One offered a ban on bribery—the other international regulation of transnational corporations. This study traces how these two interpretations of corruption as bribery and corruption as undue power of big corporations emerged from different state sponsors and how these two versions of what business–state relations should look like evolved over two decades of pre-negotiation talks at the UN and the OECD (as well as other organizations) until the understanding of corruption as bribery prevailed in the mid-1990s. The book concludes that the outcome of these debates has to a significant extent shaped the global economy as we know it today and that the discussed issues still resonate powerfully with current debates about the power of global economic actors and corporations that are ‘too big to fail.’
Chapter 2 provides a roadmap through the complex landscape of the global governance of corruption and an introduction to the implicit and explicit hypotheses that have been generated by the academic literature on the factors and agents responsible for the global anti-corruption eruption in the 1990s. The first part of the chapter presents an outline of the major global anti-corruption initiatives and introduces the main actors in five different groups. The second part of the chapter starts to analyze the question as to why there has been a global anti-corruption eruption and who are the major actors responsible for this development. This section starts to problematize corruption as a global issue by introducing the six factors that have contributed to the rise of corruption as a global policy problem: the end of the Cold War, the good governance agenda of the World Bank , the coalition building of TI , the quantification of corruption through the publication of international perception-based indices, the instrumental use of the issue of corruption as a smoke screen for policies of liberalization and finally, the role of the United States in raising corrupt payments on the global agenda. The third part of the chapter then proceeds to examine four major ways of conceptualizing global anti-corruption work: anti-corruption as an issue for global governance, as an international regime or regimes, as a movement and as an industry.
Chapter 3 argues for the relevance of sociological approach to social problem to the study of global problems and IR. To account for the social construction of a problem means to provide for historical contingencies and to understand problems as evolving products of collective definition that are in a dynamic relation to the condition they refer to. This book studies the process of definition through claims-making and other discursive strategies and practices that are presented in this chapter and are applied in the empirical chapters. In order to clarify what is meant by construction of a global problem, the chapter proceeds in three steps. First, the concept of social construction and different types of social constructs are examined in order to show that the social construction of problems provides a useful analytical vehicle in relation to factual relativism. Second, the long tradition of the study of social problems in sociology is briefly introduced, and the theory of Spector and Kitsuse on claims-making is given further attention and is adapted to IR and the cast of actors that are present on the global arena. Third, other theoretical and conceptual issues are tackled before the presentation of the cases and the data sources. The chapter concludes that the application of the Spector and Kitsuse approach to IR can help elucidate the role of power, contestation and conflict in the social construction of global issues, and in this way, it can counteract what some scholars consider to be an implicit liberal bias in much of constructivist IR scholarship.
Chapter 4 examines the first anti-corruption discussions at global venues and the first instances of global institutional legitimation. Since the 1970s, claims on corruption within international organizations developed in two major directions. The chapter argues that these clashing interpretations of the same condition can be called the Chilean and the American (US) legacies. The major difference between these two approaches was that the Chilean legacy developed at the UN and defined corruption as corporate influence on politics, while the American legacy developed predominantly at the OECD and defined corruption as bribery. The chapter examines the content of global claims at the OECD and the UN in the 1970s and argues that the successful campaign to establish corruption as a global governance problem in the 1990s can only be understood as the legacy of the 1970s. By showing that nation states pioneered the process of global social construction, the chapter lays the groundwork for the argument that state power is essential in the creation of global problems and that powerful states can be proactive participants in this process.
Chapter 5 traces the steps that led to the re-launch of global claims-making in 1989 and shows how the US concern with illicit/corrupt payments emerged in the first place. The main reason for the US initiative of 1989 was the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) , which can be seen as a product of Watergate, as much as a product of the International Telephone & Telegraph (ITT) aftermath. While the ITT affair triggered debates in the United States on the foreign policy repercussions of corporate misconduct, Watergate made these debates more domestically oriented. It was the combined work of the Subcommittee on Multinational Corporations, the Watergate Special Prosecution Force, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and a number of follow-up Senate committees that shed light on the illicit payments problem and informed much of the thinking behind the FCPA . Furthermore, the US Congressional hearings after the ITT affair were the main source of information for other governments to start their own investigations into corporate and government misconduct. As such, these testimonies provide information on the putative condition out of which global claims on corruption emerged. This is why this chapter discusses the content of the US Congress hearings on multinational corporations and foreign corporate payments. The chapter further establishes the re-emergence of claims after the 1988 Amendment to the FCPA , when the United States chose the OECD as the most appropriate internatio...