Political Order and Political Decay (13 page)

In the years after Prussia led Germany to unification in 1871 under the leadership of Chancellor Otto von Bismarck, the bureaucracy protected its autonomy from both the emperor and the incipient forces of democracy. The franchise was opened up to popular vote in gradual stages after the 1870s, and new parties like the Social Democrats came to be represented in the Reichstag (see chapter 28). But the Constitution of the Empire protected the bureaucracy from interference from parliament; while bureaucrats could sit in parliament, parliament had no power over bureaucratic appointments. There emerged by this point what political scientist Martin Shefter has labeled an “absolutist coalition” of conservative and upper-middle-class parties that supported the autonomy of the bureaucracy and protected it from attempts by new political parties to place their own followers in positions of influence.
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This absolutist coalition retained its influence well into the twentieth century, after Germany's defeat in World War I and the emergence of the first true democracy under the Weimar Republic. After the emperor was forced to abdicate in 1918, the bureaucratic apparatus that ran the country remained largely intact. The new democratic parties—the Socialists, Democrats, and Centrists—that emerged in this period were reluctant to try to place too many of their own people in the bureaucracy, for fear of provoking a reaction that would turn it against the new republic. Even in the wake of the 1920 Kapp Putsch they hesitated to purge the civil service of entrenched right-wing elements. After ultranationalists assassinated Prime Minister Walther Rathenau in 1922, political appointments increased, but these new appointees were quickly eliminated when the Nazis came to power in 1933 and promulgated a Law for the Reestablishment of a Career Civil Service, which targeted Jews, Communists, and “party-made officials.”
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The problem of excessive autonomy was greatest in the Prussian and later German military. The army was much slower than the civilian bureaucracy to open up to middle-class recruitment after the Stein-Hardenberg reforms and remained a bastion of privilege and a caste separate from civilian society well into the twentieth century.
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The Prussian army's victories over Denmark, Austria, and France gave it the political capital to press for independence from control by the elected Reichstag, and under the Bismarck constitution the military was accountable to the emperor alone. This high degree of autonomy made the military an increasing driver of German foreign policy, or, as historian Gordon Craig puts it, a “state within the state.” The General Staff's General Alfred von Waldersee began arguing at the time of the Bulgarian Crisis of 1887–1888 that war with Russia in support of Austria's interests in the Balkans was inevitable, and he pressed for preventive war. Bismarck, who wisely understood that the object of Germany's foreign policy should be to prevent emergence of a hostile anti-German coalition, was able to contain this threat, saying memorably that preventive war was like committing suicide out of fear of death. But his weaker successors failed to control the military's political influence. The General Staff under Generals Alfred von Schlieffen and Helmuth von Moltke (the Younger) drew up plans for a two-front war against France and Russia, urged an aggressive stance during the Moroccan crisis of 1905 (which drove Britain and France closer together), and pressed to support their Austrian ally in the lead-up to the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo in July 1914. The military's belief that a two-front war was inevitable became a self-fulfilling prophecy as the emperor was told he had no choice but to attack France on the army's timetable in response to events in the Balkans. World War I was the consequence.
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The tradition of autonomous bureaucracy that was established in the eighteenth century continues into the contemporary Federal Republic of Germany. The National Socialist regime on coming to power after 1933 had succeeded in subordinating the military to its will, but it left much of the civilian bureaucracy intact. In contrast to the Bolsheviks and the Chinese Communists, the Nazis neither created a parallel hierarchy of commissars nor sought to dismantle the bureaucracy wholesale. They added loyal personnel in some ministries (particularly the Ministry of Interior) and purged Communist and Jewish officials, but in the end found they needed to rely on the capacity of the civil service.
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As a result, when the Nazi regime was destroyed by the Allies in May 1945, that bureaucracy remained in place and in fact proved extraordinarily resilient despite the efforts of the Allied occupation authorities to purge it of people with Nazi backgrounds or sympathies. Some 81 percent of all Prussian civil servants had been party members, half having joined before 1933.
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The American, British, and French occupation authorities sought to de-Nazify the German government by holding war crimes trials for senior leaders at Nuremburg, and then by purging individuals from the civil service. But as the new Federal Republic was formed in 1949 and pressure mounted to put in place a competent government that could anchor the new NATO alliance against the Soviet Union, large numbers of purged officials were reinstated. A federal law passed in 1951 granted all regular civil servants, including those with Nazi backgrounds and those expelled by East Germany, a right to reinstatement.
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Of the fifty-three thousand civil servants initially purged, only about one thousand remained permanently excluded from service.

German society had changed enormously by the time of the formation of the Federal Republic in the middle of the twentieth century, with the destruction of the aristocracy and old Junker class, the discrediting of the Nazi regime, the disbanding of the state of Prussia, and the spread of genuine democratic values throughout the larger society. The political attitudes of German bureaucrats changed with the times as well. But the traditions of high-quality, autonomous German bureaucracy remained largely intact.

ONE PATH TO THE MODERN STATE

I've spent this much time on the history of the Prussian-German bureaucracy because it constitutes a widely recognized model for modern bureaucracy. But it is also representative of a path taken by a select group of countries that developed modern, nonpatrimonial states as a result of military competition and saw those states survive into the modern era. In this group I would include China at the time of the Qin and Han Dynasties some two millennia prior to Prussia, Sweden, Denmark, France, and Japan. There is no broad correlation between war and high-quality modern government; many societies that have fought wars over prolonged periods remain corrupt or patrimonial. War has merely been an enabling condition for a certain subset of countries.

Given the fragility of institutions in many developing states today, what is impressive about the Prussian-German bureaucracy is its durability and resilience. The bureaucratic tradition established in eighteenth-century Prussia survived Jena and Napoleon, transition to the German Empire, Weimar democracy and the Nazi regime, and then the return to democracy under the postwar Federal Republic. While the social composition of the bureaucracy changed enormously from an aristocratic preserve to an elite, meritocratic body reflecting the German people more broadly, it retained an esprit de corps and, most important, political support for its autonomy.

There is no question that today the German bureaucracy is under full control of the German political system, and that it is ultimately accountable to democratically elected parties represented in the Bundestag. But this control exists largely through the political minister placed by each administration at the top of the bureaucratic hierarchy. What has never happened in German history is the wholesale distribution of government offices to party workers as a matter of political patronage, as occurred in the United States, Italy, and Greece. In German history, the autonomy of the bureaucracy was often a force for enormous conservatism, if not outright militarism and foreign aggression. However, the fact that this autonomy had been secured prior to the opening up of Germany's political system to democratic politics meant, as Martin Shefter points out, that patronage politics never got a start in Germany. In countries where democracy emerged prior to the consolidation of a strong state, the results as we will see below were less positive from the standpoint of government quality.

Germany, Japan, and a small number of other countries get high rankings for the quality of their governments and low levels of corruption in the present due to an inheritance from an authoritarian phase in their political development. We cannot call them lucky, since this bureaucratic autonomy was bought at the expense of military competition, war, occupation, and authoritarian rule that undermined and delayed the advent of democratic accountability. As Huntington made clear, in political development, not all good things go together.

 

5

CORRUPTION

Some definitions of corruption; how corruption affects politics and economic growth; patronage and clientelism as early forms of democratic participation; why patronage is bad from the standpoint of democracy, but not as bad as certain other forms of corruption; why clientelism may diminish as countries get richer

In 1996, James Wolfenson, the newly appointed head of the World Bank, gave a speech in which he pointed to the “cancer of corruption” as a major impediment to the economic development of poor countries. Officials at the World Bank of course knew from the organization's beginning that corruption was a big problem in many developing countries, and that foreign aid and loans had often gone straight into the pockets of officials in countries supposedly being helped.
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Prior to Wolfenson's speech, however, there was also a widely held view among development practitioners that little could be done about this problem, and that some degree of corruption was either inevitable or not so serious as to impede economic growth. During the cold war, many corrupt governments were clients of the United States (Zaire under Mobutu Sese Seko being a prime example), and Washington was not eager to point fingers at close friends.

Since the end of the cold war, there has been a major push by international development organizations to combat corruption as part of a broader effort to build states and strengthen institutions. As we saw in the data from the Worldwide Governance Indicators in chapter 3, there is a strong correlation between government effectiveness and control of corruption. Having a strong and effective state involves more than just controlling corruption, but highly corrupt governments usually have big problems in delivering services, enforcing laws, and representing the public interest.

There are many reasons why corruption impedes economic development. In the first place, it distorts economic incentives by channeling resources not into their most productive uses but rather into the pockets of officials with the political power to extract bribes. Second, corruption acts as a highly regressive tax: while petty corruption on the part of minor, poorly paid officials exists in many countries, the vast bulk of misappropriated funds goes to elites who can use their positions of power to extract wealth from the population. Further, seeking such payoffs is often a time-consuming occupation that diverts the energies of the smartest and most ambitious people who could be creating wealth-generating private firms. Gaming the political system for private gain is what economists label “rent seeking.”
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It has been argued that bribery might increase efficiency by lubricating the process of getting business registrations, export licenses, or appointments with high officials. But this represents a very poor way of doing business: it would be much better if registration processes were quick, if export licenses didn't exist at all, or if all individuals had easy and equal access to the government. A clear rule of law is in the end far more efficient.

Apart from its distorting economic impacts, corruption can be very damaging to political order. Perceptions that officials and politicians are corrupt reduces the legitimacy of the government in the eyes of ordinary people and undermines the sense of trust that is critical to the smooth operations of the state. Charges of corruption are frequently made not in the interest of improved government but as political weapons. In societies where most politicians are corrupt, singling one out for punishment is often not a sign of reform but of a power grab. The reality and appearance of corruption are among the greatest vulnerabilities of new democracies seeking to consolidate their institutions.

If we are to understand how states make the transition from patrimonial to modern ones, we need to understand more clearly the nature of corruption and its sources. Corruption takes many forms, some of them much more damaging to economic growth and political legitimacy than others, so it is necessary to have some clarity with regard to basic definitions.

PUBLIC AND PRIVATE

There is today a huge literature on corruption and its sources, and many suggestions for potential remedies. Yet despite the scholarly work on this subject, a commonly accepted taxonomy for understanding the different behaviors that are typically lumped under the heading of corruption does not exist.
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Most definitions of corruption center around the appropriation of public resources for private gain.
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This definition is a useful starting point; under it, corruption is a characteristic primarily of governments and not, for example, of businesses or private organizations.

This definition implies that corruption is in some sense a phenomenon that can arise only in modern, or at least modernizing, societies, since it is dependent on a distinction between public and private. As we saw in the previous chapter, the distinction between the public sphere and private interest developed in Prussia only during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Prior to that point, the Prussian government (as well as virtually all European states) was patrimonial. That is to say, the prince considered himself the owner of the territories he governed, as if they were parts of his household or patrimony. He could give away lands (and the people living on them) to relatives, supporters, or rivals because they were a form of private property. It made no sense to talk about corruption in this context, since there was no concept of a public sphere whose resources could be misappropriated.