Abstract
In transitional societies in which contradictory value systems exist simultaneously, because rapid transformations have led to a neglect of old values and new ones have not yet been established, new social deformations appear or old ones intensify. Those deformations (the lack of a stable legal framework, a failure to develop democratic mechanisms, public opinion and civil society, a decline in the influence of established codes of behaviour, a poorly functioning tax system, nondevelopment of the market and financial systems, economic instability, profiteering through transformation and privatisation of state enterprise, manipulations by the political elite and the instability of the rule of law in general) tend to have a great impact on the level of crime in transition societies. One of the most prominent types of crime in those societies, if not the most prominent, is corruption. Transition is an ideal set-up for all sorts of corrupt behaviour, but some are especially dangerous, namely the so-called ‘state capture’. Although all countries in transition are susceptible to corruption, some of them have kept it to a bearable level while others have sunk into large-scale corruption. The difference between those two groups has been attributed to their historical inheritance as well as their particular experiences of transition.
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Notes
- 1.
Etymologically, ‘corruption’ derives from the Latin word “corrumpere” (“cum” and “rumpere”) which means to pervert, corrupt, deprave; spoil, rot; taint (Bekavac et al. 1998, p. 68).
- 2.
Agreement Establishing the Group of States against Corruption—GRECO—Council of Europe Committee of Ministers, Resolution (99) 5 Establishing the Group of States against Corruption, adopted on 1st May 1999.
- 3.
Today there are numerous international documents (resolutions, conventions, recommendations, decisions, strategies and codes) of the United Nations (UN), Council of Europe (CE), European Union (EU), Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), World Bank, International Chamber of Commerce (ICC), Organization of American States (OAS), etc., on suppressing corruption.
- 4.
Using statistics from Transparency International, the most quoted source of knowledge on the distribution of corruption, the so-called Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI) scores the levels of corruption in individual countries on a scale from 0 (highly corrupt) to 10 (very clean). The figures on which these results are based are generated from a number of sources, mainly combining reviews of processed data on the experiences of top-level businessmen in foreign countries with reports on the extent of corruption of analysts from ten independent organisations.
- 5.
Until 1699 the larger part of Croatia also lay within the borders of the Ottoman Empire.
- 6.
Godišnje izvješće o radu državnih odvjetništva u 2008 (Annual Report on the Work of the State Attorney’s Office in 2008), www.dorh.hr.
- 7.
Namely, those instruments are as follows: the Council of Europe Criminal Law Convention, the Additional Protocol to the Criminal Law Convention on Corruption, the Council of Europe Civil Law Convention and United Nations Convention against Corruption. The other domestic legal acts that regulate this field are: the Act for Preventing Conflict of Interest in Exercise of Public Office, the Act on the Responsibility of Legal Persons for Criminal Offence, the Witness Protection Act, the Law on the Prevention of Money Laundering, the Act on Financing Political Parties, Independent Lists and Candidates, the Public Procurement Act and the Law on the Right of Access to Information. Besides that, the National Programmes for the Suppression of Corruption, Strategies for the Suppression of Corruption and Plans of Action with clear measures, determined deadlines and clear allocations of responsibility to institutions for the advancing fight against corruption were enacted and in the meantime revised.
- 8.
The point is corroborated by a great deal of research: see for example the study comparing anti-corruption legislation in Albania, a young democracy which shows a high degree of corruption, and the Netherlands, one of the “consolidated democracies”, which, according to the same criteria, belongs among states with the least corruption (Peci and Sikkema 2010: pp. 101–118).
- 9.
At this moment a criminal procedure is underway for a number of corruptive criminal offences (which allegedly brought millions of Croatian Kunas in illegal gains) against the former Minister for the Economy, that is, former Deputy President of the Government and former Prime Minister.
- 10.
The past two decades have been marked by numerous corruption scandals in Western democratic countries. Thus, for instance, in Germany the public prosecutor in Bonn issued an indictment against former Chancellor Kohl because of a series of financial donations to his party. Richard Grasso, president of the New York stock market, was forced to resign in the autumn of 2003 because he gave himself a fine present to the amount of 140 million US dollars as a “personal benefit”. Joseph Ackerman, the Swiss president of the Deutsche Bank was accused of “breach of trust”, euphemistic wordplay covering the accusation that he had profited by business transactions while filling a dual post as manager of the Supervisory Council and Compensation Committee of the telecommunications company Mannesmann (for more details, see Brioschi 2004, pp. 172–177). Concerning corruption in Great Britain, a country that has always been considered the “mother of parliamentarism”, in the introduction to a book detailing their investigation of corruption in the British Parliament, the authors write: “Can such thieves and impostors truly strut about the Westminster Palace, concealing party-related vileness in numerous layers of mummified British parliamentary rules. Now we know they can” (Leigh and Vulliamy 1997). We also encounter a true “abundance” of corruption scandals in Italy, one of the founders of today’s EU (see e.g. Newell 2007, pp. 97–120).
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Grozdanić, V., Martinović, I. (2012). Corruption as a Metaphor for Societies in Transition?. In: Šelih, A., Završnik, A. (eds) Crime and Transition in Central and Eastern Europe. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-3517-4_7
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