Document Type

Article

Disciplines

International Law

Abstract

Although it is late in a remarkable day, a question remains hanging in the room which I would like to address: should one, in the end, favor or oppose the campaign against "corruption" currently being waged by the assortment of institutions, policy-makers and intellectuals that styles itself "the international community?" The presentations we have heard today fall rather neatly on both sides of this question and, by my own count, the issue divides our speakers roughly in half.

At the same time, no one has said, in so many words, "I oppose the campaign to eliminate corruption." Those who support the anti-corruption campaign also hedge their support with doubts, qualifications, hesitations and cautions. I would like to speculate about the relative absence of clean statements on this issue and begin to differentiate the "cautions" advanced by campaign supporters from what I see as the case against the anticorruption campaign.

One reason for vagueness among those who oppose the anticorruption campaign is clear: opposition to the anti-corruption campaign might easily be construed as support for corruption. However difficult it might be to define "corruption," in polite society one must be opposed to it. Opposition to corruption, much like opposition to terrorism or genocide or weapons of mass destruction, seems to unite the international class of commentators (if not yet the practice of the international community) even in the absence of any consensual definition or prohibition. Such norms-by-exaggeration are prevalent in international law, often substituting for the absence of a workable legislative mechanism. Where the practice is per se reprehensible to all civilized persons, there is no need for a treaty, with all the concomitant details of drafting. Where something can be said to "shock the conscience of mankind," advocates easily find the prohibition they seek. Although it is widely recognized that "one person's terrorist is another's freedom fighter," one is not permitted to speak in favor of terrorism. To oppose anti-terrorism places one uneasily outside the common sense of the international community.

My guess is that something like this is going on in the debate about corruption. Although the term "corruption" is open to all sorts of interpretations, once something has been at least plausibly swept into the corruption category, the discursive balance of forces changes. Efforts to eliminate the practice are harder to oppose. This gives anti-corruption campaigners a real political and rhetorical advantage, a sort of persuasive penumbra which overhangs the force of their specific political claim about abolition of a particular practice in a particular place. Nevertheless, I do oppose the international campaign against corruption, although I do not favor corruption. Perhaps we could describe this position as anti-anticorruption.

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