The European Unions Fight Against Corruption

The fight against corruption emerged as one of the most significant issues during the 2004 enlargement of the EU and gained even more importance with the accession of Romania and Bulgaria in 2007. In order to prepare candidate countries for membership, the EU found it necessary to create new institutions and mechanisms to address corruption. Patrycja Szarek-Mason traces the development of the EU anti-corruption framework, showing how recent enlargements transformed EU policy and highlighting inequities between the treatment of candidate countries and existing Member States. The experience gained during the 2004 enlargement led to a more robust anti-corruption stance during the accession of Bulgaria and Romania and will have implications for future enlargements of the EU. However, the framework can still be strengthened to address corruption adequately and promote higher standards among Member States, especially through greater use of 'soft law' in the form of mutually agreed, non-legally binding policy recommendations.

Analyses anti-corruption policy within EU Member States and the evolution of anti-corruption policy during the accession process.

This book analyses the development of anti-corruption as a policy field in the European Union with a particular focus on the EU Anti-Corruption Report. It reconstructs the origins of anti-corruption policy in the 1990s when the EU started to recognise corruption as a serious crime with a cross-border dimension. It also analyses the processes surrounding the downfall of the Santer Commission on charges of corruption in 1999 and the enlargement of the EU. This incorporation of transitional new Member States was accompanied by a number of specific measures, instruments and monitoring mechanisms to combat corruption at the supranational level, finally leading to the introduction of the EU-wide Anti-Corruption Report in 2014. The book presents an in-depth analysis of its implementation, abandonment and the way forward under the European Semester as the new instrument for achieving EU anti-corruption reforms. It offers a new interpretation of the Report as a form of reflexive governance that operates at multiple levels and involves not only the European institutions and national governments, but also the role of civil society actors in the process of developing anti-corruption policy. It applies the theory of reflexive governance in analysing the impact of the Report in the UK, Romania and Albania, including the involvement of non-state actors in anti-corruption policy making in these countries. The book concludes with a discussion on how future EU Anti-Corruption policy can make use of reflexive governance and offers recommendations to enhance anti-corruption policies of the EU, the Member States and Candidate States.

Anti-corruption programmes, projects and campaigns have come to constitute an essential aspect of good governance promotion over the last two decades. The post-communist countries in Eastern Europe have presented one of the first key targets of transnational anti-corruption efforts, and indeed most of these countries have shown an impressive record of respective measures. Yet path-breaking institutional and policy developments have not set in before the mid-2000s both at the international level and in most Eastern European countries. Are these the beginnings of a mutually synergetic success story? In order to answer this question, we need to better understand the complex interplay between the international and domestic domains in this policy field and geographic region. This book provides in-depth and comparative insights about this interplay, with a particular focus on the involvement of domestic social movements, governmental political machines and international legal mechanisms. We find that, on all three levels of analysis, political and material interests of relevant actors are complemented and at times contradicted by normative claims. Moreover, at the interfaces of the three levels, coincidental and spontaneous developments have largely outweighed systematic implementation and coordination of appropriate anti-corruption strategies. This book is based on a special issue of Global Crime.

As the European Union moved in the 1990s to a unified market and stronger common institutions, most observers assumed that the changes would reduce corruption. Aspects of the stronger EU promised to preclude—or at least reduce—malfeasance: regulatory harmonization, freer trade, and privatization of publicly owned enterprises. Market efficiencies would render corrupt practices more visible and less common. In The Best System Money Can Buy, Carolyn M. Warner systematically and often entertainingly gives the lie to these assumptions and provides a framework for understanding the persistence of corruption in the Western states of the EU. In compelling case studies, she shows that under certain conditions, politicians and firms across Europe, chose to counter the increased competition they faced due to liberal markets and political reforms by resorting to corruption. More elections have made ever-larger funding demands on political parties; privatization has proved to be a theme park for economic crime and party profit; firms and politicians collude in many areas where EU harmonization has resulted in a net reduction in law-enforcement powers; and state-led "export promotion" efforts, especially in the armaments, infrastructure, and energy sectors, have virtually institutionalized bribery. The assumptions that corruption and modernity are incompatible—or that Western Europe is somehow immune to corruption—simply do not hold, as Warner conveys through colorful analyses of scandals in which large corporations, politicians, and bureaucrats engage in criminal activity in order to facilitate mergers and block competition, and in which officials accept private payments for public services rendered. At the same time, the book shows the extent to which corruption is driven by the very economic and political reforms thought to decrease it.

This collection of papers provides the key elements needed to build and preserve corruption-free institutions, systems, and private enterprises.