Halfway down the Danube

Corruption 101

Via Dragos at argumente, here's a good introduction to corruption in Romania, by a foreigner for foreigners.

Several good bits. For instance:

Gonteanu shared with me fascinating May 2004 OSI research on the public attitudes that result -- 89% of Romanians surveyed think the state should “provide jobs for everyone who wants to work”; 55% think the government should start new state enterprises to boost employment; 58% think the majority of parliamentarians are corrupt; a shocking 51% think that most judges are corrupt … and 14% have themselves paid bribes in court.

And this:

What’s surprising to an outsider like me is how widely and in how much detail all this corruption (and more) are known. This was certainly somewhat a function of my milieu, which trended seriously toward young urban professionals or cultural figures sympathetic to the Liberal Party. But it’s also a measure of the deep and perhaps decisive urban/rural split in the country, which is more pronounced than any country I’ve witnessed, with the possible exception of Milosevic’s rump Yugoslavia.

In Bucharest and the other large cities, there is no shortage of critical newspapers, muckraking revelations, national and international television news, student populations, and what one diplomat called “the most youth-obsessed culture I’ve ever seen.” Not surprisingly, the opposition alliance (composed of the center-right Liberal Party and the center-left Democrats) won nearly all of the major cities, while losing most of the countryside (where plumbing isn’t widely available, let alone cable television or aggressive newspapering). According to OSI research, something like 70% of the rural population doesn’t even venture into the nearest decent-sized town more than once a month...

This is entirely consistent with what I've seen. Bucharest, Timisoara, and to a lesser extent three or four other cities (Galati, Brasov) are already a completely different world from the rest of the country. Rural Romania -- and keep in mind that roughly half of the country's population is rural -- is much poorer and, well, traumatized. They're very little-c conservative out in the countryside. Understandably so; change, for the last three generations, has meant nothing but trouble. Still, they're not going to be out in front pushing the country forward into the future.

I think the Romania-Yugoslavia comparison is also very apropos. The city of Belgrade never much cared for Milosevic -- it was a relatively cosmopolitan place. But Slobo used to overrun it with rent-a-crowds, poor rural Serbs that he'd bring in from the countryside by the busload to attend his rallies and "spontaneous" demonstrations of public support. And while one meets Serb nationalists everywhere in Serbia, it's out in the countryside that one encounters the really overheated conspiracy theories and true, deep paranoia.

Mind, the article doesn't touch on the fascinating topic of private corruption in Romania... how, for instance, the foreign purchase of a Romanian firm may have to fire half the management in the first few months, because so many of them may have various scams going on. But it's a good introduction to the topic generally.

More on this in a bit.

Posted by douglas at July 13, 2004 02:42 PM