Corruption and EU Enlargement: Who is Prepared?

As the European Union draws closer to the historic moment when it will formally invite ten candidate states to join its club, the question that is increasingly asked is “Will they be ready?” The question is not just about harmonisation of domestic law with the acquis communautaire, it also concerns more general aspects of the candidates’ political and economic systems. One of the most important of these has been corruption, and the answer to the question may be that the most urgent need for preparation is within the EU itself.

The European Commission has repeatedly identified corruption as a serious or systemic problem in at least half of the candidate states of Central and Eastern Europe. Reports published recently by the Open Society Institute’s EU Accession Monitoring Program confirm many of the EU’s worries about corruption in candidate states. Indeed, the reports go further in highlighting problems of corruption in areas that the Commission has largely neglected, notably “capture” of the process of lawmaking by private interests. Moreover, the reports find that even in areas to which the Commission pays close attention, notably public procurement, harmonisation with EU standards has done relatively little to reduce corruption.

Although corruption has not been perceived as a serious enough problem to prevent these countries from fulfilling the EU’s “Copenhagen political criteria” (essentially, that democratic institutions are secure and stable), the Commission is clearly not yet satisfied. In a speech marking the release of the 2002 Regular Reports on candidates’ preparedness for succession, Commission President Romano Prodi labelled corruption as an “extremely serious” problem which needs to be remedied before accession.

Clearly, problems of corruption will not be remedied before accession. As Czech Minister of Interior Stanislav Gross recently noted, fighting corruption is “a long distance run”. History – whether it be Germany after Hitler or Spain after Franco – shows that corruption flourishes in transition situations, and that the fight to bring it under control is better measured in decades than electoral cycles. This will be the case in most candidate states, where corruption is not rooted only in transitional chaos but also has deep historical roots.

Moreover, corruption is an area in which the EU has no clear and well-enforced framework of its own. Barely half of the current member states have ratified the EU’s own 1995 anti-fraud convention. Individual member states do not even provide information on corruption in any systematic way. Recent reports by the Council of Europe’s Group of States against Corruption (GRECO) – the only organisation that is currently monitoring the vast majority of European states according to broad principles of anti-corruption policy - noted that no overall statistics are available on corruption cases in Greece or Spain.

The EU has also been unable to persuade member states to adopt existing instruments. For example, only three member states had ratified the Council of Europe’s Criminal Law Convention on Corruption by June 2002. By contrast, armed with the Copenhagen mandate, the Commission had helped convince all but two of the CEE candidate states to do so by the same date.

If these reservations only indicated that EU countries resist the imposition of uniform standards in a sensitive area of criminal law, the argument might be made that this is not such a bad thing. However, there is significant evidence that a number of EU member states are troubled by significant levels of corruption, ranging from the Elf Aquitaine affair in France to a spate of major party financing scandals in Germany. These are the first and third largest countries in the EU. The corruption problems of the EU’s fourth largest country, Italy, are well-known. Neither Italy nor Austria are members of GRECO; all candidate states are. All this raises the inevitable question of whether the EU is able to do anything, given its current institutional constraints, to fight corruption EU-wide.

The record so far suggests it is not. A recent report by the UK National Audit Office noted a 75 precent rise in detected fraud involving EU funds from 1999 to 2000. More worrying, most of the increase was accounted for by better detection in the UK, while in a number of countries no cases of fraud were detected at all – bringing smiles to the faces of Eurosceptics. The report by GRECO on Greece adds a chilling note: according to local observers the most corruption-plagued area in Greece is the allocation and distribution of EU funds. Greece and Italy are ranked in perception surveys as slightly more corrupt than the least corrupt candidate states (Estonia and Slovenia).

Add to this the fact that the majority of candidate states are clearly ranked by perception surveys such as those used by Transparency International to construct its Corruption Perception Index – as well as business surveys carried out by the World Bank - as significantly or much more corrupt than member states, and some of the risks of enlargement become clear. Under these circumstances, the big EU enlargement question becomes not whether candidates are ready for the EU, but whether the EU is ready for them. Once candidate states are invited into the club, the Copenhagen mandate ceases, and a considerable number of countries with significant or serious corruption will enter a Union that lacks a functioning anti-corruption strategy of its own.

Under these circumstances, the EU urgently needs to beef up its corruption monitoring mechanisms, and establish anti-corruption standards across the Union – and not only in the area of criminal law. Bribery – which can directly undermine implementation of the acquis – is clearly the Commission’s main focus. However, other kinds of corruption, such as corrupt political party financing, may undermine the transposition of the acquis into national legislation (and in several cases in candidate states probably already have), not to speak of undermining the democratic values on which the EU purports to be founded.

The upshot of this is that the Union needs to find a way of ensuring that adherence to the Copenhagen Criteria remains a requirement – of all member states. As far as corruption is concerned, the clearest way to pursue this objective is for the EU to join GRECO, adopt the Council of Europe’s 20 Guiding Principles for the Fight Against Corruption, and participate in the development of the Principles and GRECO’s monitoring framework.

Quentin Reed is the editor of a series of reports on corruption in the candidate states of Central and Eastern Europe for the EU Accession Monitoring Program of the Open Society Institute. The reports are available at: http://www.eumap.org/reports