Home / Press review / Archive / Magazine / Politics / Corruption in Romania / Article

Little tokens of appreciation

Ever since the country joined the EU the fight against corruption has gained fresh impetus. A progress report on the communist legacy, political rhetoric and relative corruptibility follows.

The trend is positive: in this year's Transparency International Corruption Perception Index Romania for the first time exchanged its long-standing bottom-of-the-table ranking among EU countries with Bulgaria, where corruption has been on the increase in recent years.

Woman paying her monthly gas bill.

Photo: Matthias Häber

The progress report published by the European Commission on 23 July 2008 also confirmed Romania's success in the battle against everyday corruption, while at the same time pointing out that the politicisation of the fight against corruption in conjunction with inconsistencies in the rulings meted out by the country's higher courts were creating legal uncertainty and hindering genuine breakthroughs in the battle against high-level corruption.

Investors keeping their distance

So is Romania really endemically corrupt? Well, this is certainly how it has been perceived since 1989 - compared with all other new EU states - by both the European Commission and the member states (including their press), and this has had an impact on the behaviour of foreign investors as well as the process of integrating the country into Euro-Atlantic structures. The (alleged albeit not verifiable) piling up of corruption cases featured in press reports, the analyses of relevant institutions and rating agency estimates was interpreted by decision makers in Western politics and the business world as an indication of increased legal uncertainty and EU incompatibility. This led not only to delays in the beginning of the country's EU membership negotiations, it also meant that before 1999 Romania was the country with the lowest level of foreign investment per capita among all the candidate countries, including Bulgaria.

Critical self-perception

This situation is compounded by the self-critical attitude of the Romanians. Their political culture reveals a nation with a marked propensity for self-criticism, a people which perceive not only themselves, but above all their political class, as corrupt. Corruption is a central theme in this country's public discourse. Asked about their expectations regarding the country's EU accession, Romanians put recognition of their European identity first, but this was closely followed by the hope that the EU would help Romania to improve the morals of its political elite and free the country from corruption.

A winning campaign theme

Particularly during election campaigns, political confrontation has to a large extent been dominated by the theme of corruption. In 1996 Emil Constantinescu, who came from a civil society background, won the presidential election campaign on the strength of his attacks against the ex-communist ruling party which he claimed had made itself rich through the fraudulent acquisition of what had previously been social capital. Corneliu Vadim Tudor, leader of the left-wing nationalist "Greater Romania Party", made it to the second ballot in the 2000 presidential election campaign thanks to his anti-corruption rhetoric.

Romanian banknotes with portraits of Ion Luca Caragiale (author), Aurel Vlaicu (aviation pioneer) und Niculae Grigorescu (painter)hanging on a washing line.
Photo: Matthias Häbel

And in the 2004 elections, in imitation of Corneliu Vadim Tudor the winning candidate Traian Băsescu cast himself in the role of avenger of the people who would fight the corruption and pillaging of the "nation" by "those in power" with authoritarian and drastic problem-solving methods.

Corruption, customs and the judiciary

It is above all owing to the effect of integration into the EU that since then a change has taken hold in Romania's social and business climate which is gradually becoming apparent in the way this development is perceived. In the year 2000, when membership talks began between the EU and Romania, the World Bank and Management Systems International (MSI) conducted a survey on perceptions and experiences of corruption among more than 1,700 households, businesses and workers in Romania's public sector. According to the survey, these groups perceived corruption to be most widespread at customs authorities and within the judicial system, as well as in (former) state-run privatisation funds, parliament, the public health system and the police force. In everyday life the little tokens of appreciation ("atenţii") given to doctors, dentists, emergency services and hospital staff played a leading role, followed by companies carrying out repairs, schools, passport offices, etc.

Electronic border controls

While these last-mentioned forms of "petty corruption" can be considered a remnant of the country's "everyday culture" in communist times that have been repeatedly denounced in the targeted campaigns of government institutions and above all non-governmental organisations, the corruption at the country's borders, at customs authorities and in the police force has been reduced to a minimum thanks to the introduction of electronic procedures. The process of accession to the EU and privatisation with the participation of foreign investors has also helped to limit certain specific forms of "transformation corruption", whereas other phenomena which are not specific to the former communist states, such as tax evasion, illicit work, the subsidising of unprofitable businesses as well as state intervention on bad loans, money laundering, clientelism, irregularities in political party funding or the peddling of political influence continue to be issues that attract criticism from the EU.

Not a particularly corrupt country

So is Romania a particularly corrupt European country? For the sake of brevity the answer must be "no" - for two reasons. The first is of a methodical nature, because the terms and definitions are fuzzy and because the objectivity of the collection and assessment of data is by no means guaranteed, as many studies have shown. The second is based on pragmatic considerations: in the context of a new brand of cross-border crime which has assumed gigantic proportions, as the current bank crises (not only) in the US have made clear, focussing on "particularly corrupt Romania" almost comes across as an attempt to divert attention or flee from the big global problems.

Anneli Ute Gabanyi

Anneli Ute Gabanyi works as a political scientist in Berlin. She was born in 1942 in Bucharest and has lived in Germany since 1962. From ...
» to author index