Corruption eruption shakes every region of the globe

By Jonathan Power

LONDON (JP): It is mind-boggling that President Bill Clinton, commander-in-chief of the world's one remaining superpower, might dare to risk his country's self-interest in financial and political prudence. But he has done so by personally wooing monetary support for his re-election bid from Chinese, Thai and Indonesian businessmen and women, all with close ties to their governments.

This is the age of what Moises Naim has called "corruption eruption" that has shaken "every region regardless of cultural background or Gross National Product". The last 18 months have witnessed the fall of the secretary-general of NATO over corruption allegations, indictments for corruption of one-third of India's cabinet and graft charges against Italy's most prominent post-war prime ministers and two former South Korean presidents. This is not to mention parliamentary investigations into financial abuse by the Colombian, Pakistan and Turkish governments, graft at high levels of government in Japan and allegations of massive corruption against the former Mexican president, his brother and the assistance of Citibank in laundering the spoils.

As Robert Leiken observes in a fascinating article in Foreign Policy: "The post-Cold War period exhibits the disillusionment and cynicism that result when transcendent events are followed by shabby anticlimaxes or worse. After the Glorious Revolution, Walpole's rotten boroughs; after Lincoln, the Gilded Age; after Wilson's Fourteen Points, the Teapot Dome Scandal; after the fall of the Berlin wall, this."

We appear to be surrounded and besieged by it. Organized international crime has mushroomed in the last 30 years, partly under the influence of the drug trade and the inept inability of western politicians in consumer nations to face up to the fact that the most effective way to target the cartels is to decriminalize the product.

Illicit traffic in nuclear materials threaten our existence, raising the stakes in common criminality to unheard of proportions. Yet the decision to expand NATO and thus forsake the Russian ratification of the second Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty will put Russia's nuclear production factories back in business and with it the careless stockpiling of even more plutonium.

The arms trade has become a chaotic fungus, reaching into every nook and cranny. A judicial inquiry last year showed how British government ministers connived to turn a blind eye to the arming of Saddam Hussein and there are suggestions that some European arms companies, in the urge to clinch a deal, won't draw the line at homicide. This is evident following the murder of a leading socialist politician in Belgium to the murder of a young British investigative reporter at work in Chile.

In Sweden, where probity is the most prized of all virtues, a former senior executive of the Swedish arms manufacturer, Bofors, told a national daily that he couldn't sleep at night for thinking there was some connection between the bribes paid by his company in India and the murder of Prime Minister Olof Palme.

The tide is changing but there are those who are making reform particularly difficult. In India, the voters punished Prime Minister P. Narasimha Rao's tainted government with a crushing defeat last year and in Mexico President Ernesto Zedillo is hammering away at both bribery and drug barons.

Even in Colombia, where allegations of having received drug money for his election campaign still hang over President Ernesto Samper, police and justice officials continue to prosecute other malefactors with a commendable earnestness. In Brazil, popular agitation pushed parliament to depose the totally crooked president, Fernando Collor Da Mello.

Was there ever a golden age? In 1788 Edmund Burke attacked the colonial administrator of Bengal, Warren Hastings and said: "Bribery, filthy hands, a chief governor of a great empire receiving bribes from poor, miserable, indigent people, this is what makes government itself base, contemptible and odious in the eyes of mankind."

In early modern Europe the sale of office was defended on the grounds of efficiency by Montesquieu and Bentham. But even if there never was a golden age there was much less corruption and it was less pervasive. The sums involved were not sufficient to "buy" a whole government. It rarely corrupted the integrity of a government in its foreign dealings -- the charge that Clinton is now having to counter.

Nevertheless, in many ways, America has a cleaner slate than most. In the U.S. it is illegal to use bribes in market transactions abroad. But in Germany, as in much of Europe, if a German bribes a foreign government official he can claim it as a tax reduction. In Britain off-shore islands thrive on legal tax- evasion and the address of arms sellers and the like.

It is simplistic to blame this on the capitalist system's greed, or even Thatcherite-Reaganite liberalization. A majority of capitalists are not seriously corrupt. But many governments often turn a blind eye because it is convenient to do so. It is governments that have to set the standard. Voters as far away as India, Belgium and Brazil have made that sentiment clear. In America, regrettably, they have missed their chance, for now at least.