Best System Money Can Buy

As the European Union moved in the 1990s to a unified market and stronger common institutions, most observers assumed that the changes would reduce corruption. Aspects of the stronger EU promised to preclude—or at least reduce—malfeasance: regulatory harmonization, freer trade, and privatization of publicly owned enterprises. Market efficiencies would render corrupt practices more visible and less common.In The Best System Money Can Buy, Carolyn M. Warner systematically and often entertainingly gives the lie to these assumptions and provides a framework for understanding the persistence of corruption in the Western states of the EU. In compelling case studies, she shows that under certain conditions, politicians and firms across Europe, chose to counter the increased competition they faced due to liberal markets and political reforms by resorting to corruption. More elections have made ever-larger funding demands on political parties; privatization has proved to be a theme park for economic crime and party profit; firms and politicians collude in many areas where EU harmonization has resulted in a net reduction in law-enforcement powers; and state-led "export promotion" efforts, especially in the armaments, infrastructure, and energy sectors, have virtually institutionalized bribery.The assumptions that corruption and modernity are incompatible—or that Western Europe is somehow immune to corruption—simply do not hold, as Warner conveys through colorful analyses of scandals in which large corporations, politicians, and bureaucrats engage in criminal activity in order to facilitate mergers and block competition, and in which officials accept private payments for public services rendered. At the same time, the book shows the extent to which corruption is driven by the very economic and political reforms thought to decrease it.

"Carolyn Warner's well-documented book shows that corruption in the European Union is fostered by democracy, free trade and decentralization, the very factors that are often portrayed as the institutional foundations of transparency. In so doing, it challenges the conventional wisdom about the anti-corruption benefits of political and economic competition. This engaging exposé is written with a sense of irony, but it turns the EU's squeaky-clean self-promoting international image into farce."—David D. Laitin, The James T. Watkins IV and Elise V. Watkins Professor of Political Science, Stanford University, "The Best System Money Can Buy is a stunning account of entrenched corruption and failed accountability in the European Union. With striking evidence and powerful reasoning, Carolyn M. Warner shows how privatization, decentralization, and economic integration have—in the context of weak oversight, lax enforcement, and insatiable needs for campaign funding—fostered new forms and sustained old forms of corruption in the wealthy democracies of Western Europe. Anyone who thinks corruption is primarily a problem of emerging democracies needs to read this book. As Warner demonstrates, 'the unchained liberal market is not self-correcting,' but rather requires serious and independent institutions of accountability."—Larry Diamond, Senior Fellow, Hoover Institution

Carolyn M. Warner is Associate Professor of Political Science at Arizona State University. She is the author of Confessions of an Interest Group: The Catholic Church and Political Parties in Europe.