Give corruption a chance.

• Author: Sharma, Vivek S.
• Position: Report

Corruption, more often than not, seems to resemble a plague. Afghanistan, where the CIA and British intelligence (in competition with the Iranians) have quite literally been handing over duffel bags stuffed full with taxpayer money to Prime Minister Hamid Karzai and his associates, is perhaps the most prominent example of its invasiveness and hardiness. Nothing seems to be able to eradicate it. Immunization efforts fail. Mutations occur. The only course seems to be to attempt to adapt to it. For despite the efforts expended by several American presidents on behalf of Karzai's administration, the United States has no surer way of ensuring influence and access to Karzai and his advisers than through direct cash payments into a slush fund designed to purchase the loyalty of important and powerful personages within the Afghan government. The bankruptcy of the Western strategy in Afghanistan could hardly be expressed in more vivid terms. Such failures in Afghanistan, not to mention Iraq, have occurred while the broader (and noncoercive) dimensions of "state building" or more generally "development" have also paid less-than-stellar returns. It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that the project of implanting "good" institutions in non-Western societies, whether through conquest (as in Iraq and Afghanistan) or through consensual, noncoercive means (as in Cambodia), has turned out to be a thankless task.

But is corruption really the source of the problem? Rather than viewing it as a pathology, as most Westerners seem to do, it is better to understand it as a type of currency used to establish and manage power relationships under certain systems of authority. As such, it is neither inherently unstable nor illegitimate. If the international community wants to eradicate corruption in the developing world, it is imperative to understand what it is, how it works, and why it is a potentially stable and legitimate system. Doing this requires stepping back and viewing the evolution of political order through a different set of lenses than most people are accustomed to, but the potential payoff for doing so is a greater sensitivity to how foreign societies actually work--and a deeper understanding of why changing them is so very difficult.

For several millennia now human societies have created political structures that can be termed "states." What we call the "modern state," however, is a historically unique phenomenon that emerged organically in Western Europe by the nineteenth century and has been characteristic of Western political organization ever since. This modern state is defined by several characteristics, each of which is necessary for an entity to be properly termed a state. These characteristics are a monopoly on legitimate violence over a defined territory and population over which no higher authority exists. Defined as such, it is clear that what is being described is a type of political authority and critically, not a type of administration. Having a monopoly on legitimate violence over a defined territory and population does in fact require organization and administration. It does not, however, require a particular type of "administration" (specifically, it does not require what Max Weber called a "rational-legal" bureaucracy). It is, as is well understood, entirely possible (and logically coherent) to have a modern state operate according to principles other than those that define modern Western societies (that is, an administration or bureaucracy that functions on the basis of meritocracy underpinned by specific liberal notions of fairness and ethical conduct). In other words, it is critical to bear in mind that the problem that the development community is seeking to confront is not primarily a problem of administration (although these too of course exist): it is, instead, primarily a problem of authority. Having a modern state (replete with modern administrative forms) does not imply anything about how power and authority actually function within it. The modern state does not create the emergence of modern legal-rational forms of authority, and so simply creating those administrative structures will not do anything to guarantee that they actually function internally in a salutary way.

The World Bank has pithily described the development project's essence as how to turn the Congo into Denmark. The logical place to start answering this question is by examining how Denmark became "Denmark." When these policy makers turn to the academic literature on Western political development, what they find is that it is principally a story of the emergence of modern forms of governance and above all those of the state. There is an implicit and explicit assumption in the European political-development literature that the emergence of the modern West is tied to the rise of administration. The wonders of modern Western civilization become the positive...