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Does Hypocrisy Matter? National Reputational Damage and British Anti-Corruption Mentoring in the Balkans

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Abstract

In the late 2000s, numerous prominent public commentators raised concerns that corruption scandals were harming Britain’s ability to play a leadership role in anti-corruption initiatives abroad. With a view to contributing to critical criminological scholarship on international policy transfer and double standards in criminal justice policy and practice, this article explores the extent to which reputational damage curtailed Britain’s appeal as an anti-corruption mentor in South-East Europe during the 2000s. Challenging the common presumption that stronger states tarnished by corruption scandals will face ‘hypocricy costs’ abroad, this article finds that a range of factors work to insulate stronger states from the potential ramifications of reputational decline.

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Notes

  1. Domestic material costs are also expected, but such expectations may be overstated. This point is well illustrated by the fact that a major political scandal in Britain, which arose with revelations of widespread abuse and fraudulent claiming of expenses funds by members of parliament and which, in 2009, enveloped the entire political class, produced minimal effects upon political participation and upon voting outcomes in the general election held the following year, despite having stimulated strong levels of public anger and expectations of an electoral backlash (see further Pattie and Johnston 2012).

  2. On the concept of meta-capital and its fungibility, see further Bourdieu (1991) and Bourdieu and Wacquant (1992).

  3. As with stereotyping practices more generally, ‘sticky’ reputations are a means by which the disorder produced by complex realities is made more manageable (Douglas 1966). In the case of South-East Europe, for example, the stigma associated with the region’s geo-political and geo-economic peripherality (on which see Todorova 1997) has been compounded by the utility of the ‘Balkan’ label for commentators on the political space after the end of the Cold War (Goldsworthy 1998).

  4. Other elite actors –such as financial market strategists– may not be sufficiently close to the state elite, leaving the former unfamiliar with the operational code of the latter and reliant instead upon the state’s ‘myth system’ as the basis for their working assumptions (i.e., they are restricted to following official policy pronouncements), and are thereby susceptible to falling prey to state cunning (as illustrated by Hassdorf 2007).

  5. Negative characterisations of Britain as the duplicitous and purely self-interested ‘perfidious Albion’ have been equally persistent over time. The notion of ‘bad faith’ widely attributed to the British by both French and Germans during World War Two, for example, drew on an already old cliché of English traditions of disloyalty, a cliché whose fortunes have undulated over history (Schmidt 1953). Yet the stereotype of British shrewdness may be interpreted as serving to justify the country’s large reserves of meta-capital, and not therefore ultimately standing at odds with Britain’s role as an exemplar in the field of anti-corruption.

  6. For a full history of the Al-Yamamah scandal, see Feinstein (2011).

  7. For the importance of the national reputation of the ‘Country of Origin’ in corporate branding for products and services alike, especially in foreign markets, see, e.g., Michaelis et al (2008).

  8. Because of a name dispute with Greece, the country’s official UN designation is The Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia.

  9. Crown Agents have not attracted similar controversy as a provider of EU-funded support to Kosovo’s anti-corruption institutions, or as a consultant for procurement and customs reform in both Kosovo and Macedonia.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Law, Birkbeck, University of London, Malet Street, London, WC1E 7HX, UK

    Sappho Xenakis

  2. Organised Crime Unit, Directorate General Migration and Home Affairs, European Commission, Brussels, Belgium

    Kalin Ivanov

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  1. Sappho Xenakis
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  2. Kalin Ivanov
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Correspondence to Sappho Xenakis.

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Xenakis, S., Ivanov, K. Does Hypocrisy Matter? National Reputational Damage and British Anti-Corruption Mentoring in the Balkans. Crit Crim 25, 433–452 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10612-016-9345-4

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