Tag Archives: Greece

Guest Post: Lessons from Athenians’ Efforts to Define Corruption

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Gab readers have been treated to a lively and valuable debate in past weeks on precisely what we mean when we say that someone or some behavior is “corrupt.” Many readers have joined the discussion. Responding to my request for their views by offering comments and analyses of six real world cases where a court, ethics commission, or legislature has been asked to decide whether the conduct of a public official was corrupt.

I had promised to post “the right answers” to the six, or at least the answers the court, commission or legislature gave this week. I am putting it off to share the guest post below by classics scholar and American attorney Kellam Conover. Drawing on the dissertation that garnered him a PhD. in Classics from Princeton, he explains how citizens of ancient Athens decided when an official’s conduct was corrupt. What he takes from their method provides the only way I see for arriving at genuine right answers – not only to the six cases I presented but to the general issues of how to define corruption and how to measure our progress in overcoming it. Many thanks Kellam.

I have read with great interest the fascinating discussion that has unfolded recently among Bo Rothstein, Matthew Stephenson, Robert Barrington, Paul Heywood, and Michael Johnston.  The questions they raise about how to define corruption, how to link up theory with practice, and how to measure success are all ones I have grappled with since writing my dissertation on Bribery in Classical Athens. 

As a historian, I’ve spent far more time describing corruption than prescribing solutions.  But I hope a few observations from ancient Athens will be helpful to others.  First, in my view corruption defies definition because it is an inherently political claim that changes with different social and political contexts.  Second, and as a result, it may be fruitful to augment anti-corruption programs with institutions specifically designed for articulating, contesting, and legitimating evolving political norms.  Finally, I offer one potential metric of success:  i.e., whether patterns of corruption in a polity have grown less disruptive over time.

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The “Big Government Causes Corruption” Zombie Shambles On

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I don’t make a practice of responding to opinion columns in mainstream newspapers, especially when they’re not specifically or primarily about corruption. But the opening of Bret Stephens’ piece in yesterday’s New York Times caught my eye, mainly because the column used corruption in the Greek health care system as the “hook” for an argument that President Biden’s ambitious plans for an expanded social safety net will lead to American decline. Here’s how Stephens opens his column:

Years ago, Alexis Tsipras, the party leader of Greece’s Coalition of the Radical Left, surprised me with a question. “Here in the United States,” the soon-to-be prime minister asked me over breakfast in New York, “why do you not have this phenomenon of passing money under the table?”

The subject was health care. Greece has a public health care system that, in theory, guarantees its citizens access to necessary medical care.

Practice, however, is another matter. Patients in Greek public hospitals, Tsipras explained, would first have to slip a doctor “an envelope with a certain amount of money” before they could expect to get treatment. The government, he added, underpaid its doctors and then looked the other way as they topped up their income with bribes.

Take a close look at any country or locality in which the government offers allegedly free or highly subsidized goods and you’ll usually discover that there’s a catch.

What is the point of opening with this anecdote (other than not-so-subtly alerting the reader that the author is the sort of important person who has chit-chats with world leaders)? The implication, so far as I can tell, seems to be that countries that provide free or heavily subsidized social welfare benefits tend to be more corrupt.

There is, however, an important problem with this argument: It’s not true.

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Too Much of a Good Thing? Moderation and Anticorruption Strategies in Greece

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This past month’s headlines have been dominated by the Greek debt crisis and how it has been handled (or mishandled) by the EU and IMF. The Syriza party, which rose to prominence due in large part to its opposition to the austerity measures imposed upon Greece by its creditors, first rejected a deal offered by its European creditors to procure additional funds and then, following the resignation of its finance minister and a hotly contested vote in Parliament, accepted the imposition of additional restrictions, including “consumer tax increases and pensions cuts” in anticipation of another round of negotiations to receive a bailout “worth about 85 billion euros.” It is impossible to predict what the final terms of any deal reached during the course of these negotiations may be; once the dust has finally settled and Greece has either acquiesced to the demands of its European creditors in order to secure needed funds or undertaken the “Grexit” from the Euro that many commentators fear, its government will be forced to once more take stock of its economic position and determine the best path forward to meet both the obligations imposed upon it by its creditors and its people’s desire for a brighter economic future.

Given this ongoing macroeconomic and political crisis, measures to address corruption in Greece–both domestically and abroad–may seem like a secondary concern at best. Yet there are those (especially those sympathetic to Greece’s international creditors) who believe that Greece’s troubles are due at least in part to its failure to adequately address corruption, and that Greece could bolster its faltering economy if it reined in the rampant corruption that has perennially placed Greece amongst the most corrupt nations in the European Union. And while Syriza and its creditors may agree on very little, Syriza in fact also made anticorruption a major part of its campaign platform, though its attempts to implement more robust anticorruption measures are at best in their nascent stages and have been overshadowed by the recent contentious negotiations over a new bailout.

So while this may seem premature, perhaps we should consider how the Greek government ought to approach its anticorruption struggle in the coming years. And here, strategic prioritization is likely to be essential: If we presume (reasonably) that Greece is unlikely to be able to commit considerably greater resources to its anticorruption efforts in the near term, the Greek government will have to make some difficult choices regarding how best to allocate its finite resources when deciding if and how to target different forms of corruption.

One such choice will be how much to prioritize the fight against foreign bribery (that is, bribes paid by Greek citizens and firms in other countries). Last March, the OECD released a report chiding Greece for not having “given the same priority to fighting foreign bribery as it has to domestic corruption,” a decision that, according to the OECD, “sends an unfortunate message that foreign bribery is an acceptable means to…improve Greece’s economy during an economic crisis.” This may well be true. Yet to the extent that Greece is able to renew its focus upon combating corruption in the aftermath of its current bailout negotiations, Greece would be better off if it (temporarily) ignores the OECD’s advice and instead focuses primarily on domestic rather than foreign corruption. There are several reasons for this:

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Greece’s Golden Opportunity: Economic Crisis and Corruption

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Greece’s struggles with corruption are longstanding. Greece has perennially been viewed as one of, if not the, most corrupt countries in the European Union (EU). (In 2014, for example, Greece was tied, along with Italy and Romania, for last among EU countries in Transparency International’s Corruption Perception Index). Recently, however, coverage of Greece’s ongoing battle with corruption has increased dramatically due to two interrelated factors: (1) the election of the Syriza party, which has never before held political power and ran in part on an anticorruption platform; and (2) ongoing negotiations with other members of the EU to receive additional, vitally important bailout funds as Greece continues to struggle to rebound from an economic crisis that first began in 2010 (in which some have suggested that Greece’s receipt of any additional loans should be conditioned on its ability to make “credible progress in boosting [its] tax take and fighting corruption”).

Transparency International and others are (admittedly somewhat reservedly) hopeful that the election of the Syriza party will signal a renewed focus on combating corruption by the Greek government, calling its campaign platform “music to our ears as long as [its] commitments remain strong and unwavering” and noting that the “new government seems more committed to addressing corruption than past ones.” And there have been some promising early indications of the new government’s willingness to combat corruption.  For example, its new anticorruption chief recently announced he will be investigating 80,000 of the wealthiest individuals in Greece who are believed to have funds in foreign bank accounts for tax evasion. Nonetheless, there have been some rumblings of discontent from both anticorruption activists and the broader international community. Other members of the EU have accused the government of “wasting important time” in instituting anticorruption measures and commentators have noted that too little has been done to make good on campaign promises of “tackl[ing] the corrupt oligarchical business elites that dominate the economy.”

It is likely premature to judge the Syriza govenrment’s commitment or ability to combat corruption.  Yet as Greece continues to grapple with an economic crisis that has left the country reeling – and dependent upon significant loans from the International Monetary Fund and the EU – it seems an appropriate time to draw attention to the fact that this crisis has presented both the Syriza government and broader anticorruption community with a rare opportunity to make significant strides in addressing corruption in Greece, an opportunity that prior administrations have failed to appropriately capitalize on.

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