In
assignment one I gave a short overview of corruption in Belgium, with the
Electrawinds case as an illustration of conflict of interests. This shows that
rather than direct bribery or extortion, seeking for influence within political
elites is the main type of corruption in this country. Michael Johnston (2006)
would place this case in the category of “influence markets”. Belgium is a
well-established democracy with strong institutions. In influence markets,
corruption doesn't directly threaten the viability of the system, but private
actors will more subtly try to steer a policy in the direction that would meet
their interests. The stakes are the details of the policy -whether a program
will be funded, a contract awarded, a group declared exempt from tax... This
happens often through political figures acting as middlemen, as is seen in the case
of Electrawinds.
Johnston'
syndromes are however broad categories with scope for nuances. In this essay, I
will concentrate more on the specific political and social context in Belgium.
Historically,
Belgium has been divided along three main social cleavages, namely: catholic/liberal,
capital/labour and French/Flemish. With the decline of religiosity, the first
source of conflict lost some of its salience and is now replaced by the
dominant linguistic cleavage. Belgians tried to manage these divisions through
consociationalist and corporatist systems. Unlike similar systems in Europe is Belgium
characterized by its bilateral and unidimensional nature, as all three divisions
are to a large extent overlapping along territory. While the class dimension of
politics may take a weak attempt to unite Walloon and Flemish citizens across
the linguistic border, the underlying cultural differences still keep them
apart, and separate a great deal of political life into the two blocs.
Another
important characteristic is the direct connection between the social groupings,
political parties and with the government itself. Unlike traditional
corporatist solutions that generally address economic issues using formal
groups, consociationalist solutions tend to be more informal and depend upon
elite interactions.
Belgium is a
partitocracy. This means that political parties tend to control the allocation
of positions and policy choices in government, the appointment of many officials,
including judges, and most aspects of governing. While to some degree the same
characterisation is true of any modern democracy, the extent of control of
parties in Belgium appears to exceed that in most other systems. Katz and
Mair’s (1995) concept of cartel parties that are primarily concerned about
maintaining their own collective control over the instrumentalities of
government to some extent captures the nature of these parties. Belgian
parties, and especially their leaderships, have been able to maintain this
central position and to use the state for their own ends, just as the state has
to some extent used them to provide some cohesion to the governing process.
Democracy seems to become an elite phenomenon, with a crucial role for party
‘bosses’ but little connection with the political masses.
The party dominance has also led to the continuing use of patronage and clientelism.
Federalism
represents another dimension of the solution to the governance problems created
by the divisions within Belgian society. The rather extreme and complex version
of federalism however poses some significant problems for managing society in a
coherent and effective manner. For example, incompetence can be caused by
unclear definitions of responsibilities between administrations. Incompetence
and policy imperfections cause similar problems for society as corruption
(excessive public costs, energy rationing, inefficient use of public money,
insufficient treatment of issues as water pollution, …). This is why it is hard
to measure actual corruption. Incompetence can for example be caused by corrupt
political appointment processes. Or the corrupt individual can easily blame
policy failures for the consequences that he causes.
This essay
talks about the social, political and institutional context in which forms of
structural corruption are imbedded. The scope of this corruption is hard to
measure and concrete instructions to go against it are difficult to state, as
they should go back to the roots of the system. Examples would be: simplifying
the federal system and making the different administrative levels more coherent,
democratising political parties, increasing transparency, name and shame in
case of conflict of interest, …
B.G. Peters
(2006) argues however, that mild forms of corruption as exist in Belgium (that
others perhaps wouldn’t even call corruption) can also be functional. He says
that: “there may be an optimal level of corruption that provides the means for
greasing the wheels of the public sector and providing ways of reaching
agreements that are better than the lowest common denominator agreements that
might be expected, especially in as complex and divided a system as Belgium.”
References
Cantillon, E. (2015) Rebel Initiative-Corruption in Today’s Belgium.
Johnston, M. (2006) Syndromes of Corruption. Wealth, Power, and
Democracy. Colgate University, New York.
Peters, B. G. (2006) Consociationalism, corruption and chocolate:
Belgian exceptionalism, West European Politics, 29:5, 1079-1092.
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