The fourth and final dimension of categorization is the legality of public actors’ elite-interested actions.[1] The general concept we are going to use here is “corruption,” for which we use following mainstream definition, popularized by anti-corruption NGO Transparency International:[2]
- Corruption is the abuse of entrusted power for private gain.
This dimension’s interpretative layers and the related concepts can be seen in Table 2.8. The starting point is the state led by the ruling elite, possessed of the monopoly of legitimate use of violence and using it for taxation, that is, extracting monetary resources (legally) from the people living under the authority of the state. Further categories can be defined as follows:
- Corrupt state is a state where corruption influences the implementation of the law. On this level, corruption happens by a high occurrence of separate/occasional incidents when officials of the state bureaucracy accept or request financial or other benefits (that is, bribes) for handling a case in a manner advantageous to the dispenser of the benefits (bribes). Furthermore, although in a corrupt state civil administrative or business matters can be best managed through bribes, bribery and corruption are regarded as deviant element by the state and persecuted as illegal acts accordingly.
- Captured state is a corrupt state where corruption influences the content of laws and rules as well. On this level, corruption vertically reaches even the higher layers of governance and, rather than manifesting in only occasional transactions, it shows signs of a regular nature with more or less permanent chains of corrupt vassalage. Furthermore, although state capture on this level is partial in the sense that the instruments of public authority are not fully appropriated by corrupt actors, corruption becomes a structural element of the system.
- Criminal state is a captured state where corruption is centralized and monopolized by the ruling elite. On this level, the instruments of public authority are fully appropriated by the hierarchy of corrupt actors, usually a political enterprise gaining constitutional powers (for full appropriation requires disabling legal checks and corrupt a multitude of state institutions on the national level). Thus, corruption becomes, in a criminal state, a constituting element of the system.
In Chapter 5, we will elaborate on the types of corruption in greater detail [→ 5.3]. Here, there are two features to note. First, the states defined above do not necessarily operate primarily on the principle of elite interest. In a corrupt state, there is a conflict of interest between the ruling elite and the state apparatus, where the latter attempts to enforce its interests against the former. Usually, this means that the ruling elite wants to follow the principle of societal interest, whereas corrupt members of the state apparatus hinder this aim for personal gain [→ 5.3.2.2]. Indeed, as corruption meets the intention of neither the regulator (the one who makes the to-be-corrupted laws) nor the dominant institution (in this case, the formal, legal institution that provides the actual framework of political action), we can see the frequent but still occasional cases of low-level corruption as a non-structural deviation. The situation is similar in a captured state, where it is private actors, mostly businessmen, who turn specific members of the ruling elite against the principle of societal interest [→ 5.3.2.3]. However, while the state as a whole does not run on elite interest here, as a result of state capture the intention of the regulator becomes to facilitate corruption. Thus, corruption becomes a structural deviation. It is only in a criminal state that the state necessarily runs on the principle of elite interest, where corruption meets the intention of both the regulator and the dominant institution (in this case, the informal patronal network). Corruption becomes a constitutive element of the regime, whereas corrupt acts are centralized and monopolized by the ruling elite [→ 5.4.1.1].[3]
Second, as we move from corrupt state to the criminal state, the legal status of corruption “whitens:” the means of corrupt actors includes more and more legal elements in the illegal chain of actions, and corruption is more and more tolerated or even endorsed in extreme cases. In a corrupt state, corruption is a pure deviance from the legal framework of the state, and it is persecuted by law-enforcement as such; in a captured state, it is a structural element, and the corrupt gain for the private party appears in form of favorable regulations or favoritism, staying within the legal limits of the state. Yet collusion is usually deemed illegal, and the fact that the means of public authority are only “partially appropriated,” to use the phrase of Janine Wedel who contrasts such states to fully appropriated “clan-states” (see Box 2.4), legal persecution of the capture itself is not disabled on the national level [→ 5.4.1.2].
In a criminal state, the state becomes fully appropriated and every institution of the state are connected to form a corrupt machinery, and the legal persecution of the ruling elite’s criminal acts is effectively disabled as a consequence [→ 4.3.5.2]. But the actions themselves do not cease to be
| 2.4. Box: From partially to fully appropriated state. “Differences between the ‘partially appropriated state’ and the ‘clan-state’ appear to lie in (1) the degree of penetration of state bodies and authorities and the nature of vertical linkages and (2) the degree to which politics is dominated by groups such as institutional nomads and clans and has become merely a means for them to access state resources for themselves. The partially appropriated state and the clan-state fall along a continuum—from substantial appropriation of the state by private actors to sweeping appropriation and from considerable use of politics to access state resources to a near wholesale intertwining of state resources and politics. […] Under the ‘partially appropriated state,’ informal groups use state actors, who are corruptible and ‘bought.’ For example, informal groups in Poland may use or help to place non-group members in Parliament. However, in Russia, under the ‘clan-state’ model, clan members actually occupy positions in the executive branch as a clan and are themselves ‘bought.’ […] With respect to (2) the domination and use of politics, in the clan-state, as contrasted with the partially appropriated state, politics is less a way to present competing views of public policy to voters, and more a means to split up the spoils of state resources.” – Janine R. Wedel, “Corruption and Organized Crime in Post-Communist States: New Ways of Manifesting Old Patterns,” Trends in Organized Crime 7, no. 1 (Fall 2001): 33. |
illegal—on the contrary [→ 4.3.4.3]. Besides using the legal means of public authority, a criminal state commits isolated violations of the law which take the form of linked actions of corruption. Linked actions combine acts that are unlawful in and of themselves (extortion, fraud and financial fraud, embezzlement, misappropriation, money laundering, insider trading, agreements that limit competition in a public procurement or concession procedure etc.) with acts that are not unlawful in and of themselves (motions submitted by independent Parliamentary representatives, instigating tax audits etc.). Therefore, although much of the activity gets an explicit legal form, the criteria for a criminal organization according to the Palermo Protocols[4]still apply to the ruling elite: “three or more people,” “a group formed for an extended period of time and acting in concert” that has a “hierarchy” and “mutually-reinforcing effects on those acting in it,” and includes “the objective of perpetrating criminal offenses,” “dividing up tasks” required for this, and if necessary, “contracting” persons outside of the criminal organization.
The difficulty in deeming the acts of a criminal state illegal is that, in a modern state based on the rule of law, it is the court which has the authority to declare illegality, whereas it follows the definition of criminal state that the judicial branch has no independence to rule against the rulers. However, there are two phenomena that make the scholarly declaration of illegality in case of a criminal state more than mere (albeit probable) accusations. First, we can observe precisely the inactivity of control mechanisms, which is usually not independent from the actions, regulations or appointments, of the rulers. Inactivity manifests in politically selective law enforcement, including the office of the public prosecutor (state attorney) routinely rejecting complaints against the ruling elite. As we mentioned above, disabling controls is one of the necessary features of successful corrupt transactions, especially if they are permanent and often repeated, and this would not be necessary if all the acts were legal. For then, even an independent court could find no incongruence to efficient law [→ 4.3.5].
Second, under a completely legal state, the members of society are all positioned in various orders organized along lines of clear positions, and no one has the role of mediating between the actual keepers of either political or economic authority and the formal actors of these spheres. In other words, de facto and de jure positions coincide, and no “extra players” are required to hide the difference between the actual and the legally declared social positions, wealth and power, of those who fill these roles. Yet, in criminal states, so-called “economic front men” appear, formally keeping the enormous wealth of the top members of the ruling elite who would not be allowed by law to accumulate fortunes from state expenditures [→ 3.4.3].
[1] In earlier works, we referred to this dimension by the term “legitimacy” instead of legality. However, it would be confusing now if we stated some states are illegitimate, for we have defined the state as the monopolist of legitimate coercion. On the other hand, the ways this coercion is used can be illegal (as well as legal).
[2] TI, “Corruption Perceptions Index 2011 – FAQ.”
[3] Although we use different definitions, our terminology is highly influenced by David O. Friedrichs, who established a broader typology of state criminality. See Friedrichs, Trusted Criminals, 133–41.
[4] Act CI of 2006 on the promulgation of the United Nations Conventions against transnational organized crime, as established in Palermo on 14 December 2000.