Quick Fix Solutions-Anticorruption as Core/Peripheral Modality of the ‘Rule of Law’

Abstract

Anticorruption has become the fulcrum of conditionalities for unstable democracies. In the EU, antigraft packages formed the common denominator of stabilization policies for Romania, Bulgaria, the Western Balkans, Moldova, and Ukraine. Union conditionalities trailed broader international trends and campaigns. The shift led to a crescendo of institutional innovations. Discursively, it generated a degree of conceptual overlap: anticorruption, for peripheral stabilization purposes, equates with the rule of law. I argue that the exclusive stress on anticorruption as a panacea for the (semi)periphery is fraught with perplexities. Paradoxically, in systems that can be reliably described as corrupt, the policy has a propensity to be derailed from its ostensible purposes. This danger results partly from categorial tensions between RoL normativity, on the one hand, and, on the other, the ethical purism and policy quantification inextricably linked with anticorruption. In the context of peripheral crusades, tendencies towards legal instrumentalism and populist emotionalism are exponentially higher than in stable jurisdictions. Consequently, unidirectional attempts to stabilize such systems by way of repressive anticorruption backfire. Likelier results are instability or forms of stability that might not correspond to central, received understandings of how a rule of law liberal-democratic system should operate. By the same token, in the integrated transnational constitutional system located at the intersection of EU and Council of Europe guarantees, “reverse conformities” tend to upset core tenets and representations of the rule of law. The paper argues that anticorruption policies, albeit eminently useful, should be fettered by rule of law constraints, not equated with the notion of the rule of law.