THE VIRTUES OF CORRUPTION / THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

The Virtues of Corruption

After fruitless attempts to work against patronage systems in Iraq and Afghanistan, the U.S. ended up bankrolling the patrons.

By Mark Moyar

May 31, 2015 4:32 p.m. ET

On Feb. 1, 2006, after meeting with world leaders in London, the Afghan government signed a pledge to “expand its capacity to provide basic services to the population throughout the country.” It vowed to “recruit competent and credible professionals to public service on the basis of merit.” It also pledged to fight corruption, uphold justice and promote human rights.

M.A. Thomas begins “Govern Like Us” by asking why Afghanistan has fallen so far short of this grand vision. A decade after Hamid Karzai’s pro-Western government replaced the Taliban, the organization Transparency International ranked Afghanistan at the very bottom of its corruption index, in a tie with North Korea and Somalia.  

Govern Like Us

By M.A. Thomas
(Columbia, 254 pages, $45)
 

Popular authors such as Jeffrey Sachs and Jared Diamond have blamed the problems of Third World governance on a lack of financial resources. In their view, a condition of “underdevelopment” results from environmental and geographic disadvantages, such as climates conducive to infectious diseases and a lack of navigable waterways. With sufficiently large foreign investments to overcome these disadvantages, they say, economic development can take off and governance will take care of itself.

Not so fast, says Ms. Thomas. Resources are not the sole problem or the biggest one. Third World governments make inefficient use of aid, she says, because they are loath to veer away from traditional strategies of governing. Among the most prominent of these strategies is patronage, whereby rulers provide money, jobs and favors in return for support. The Afghan government typifies a patronage-based system; and its particularly high corruption rating reflects the magnification of patronage by the particularly high amounts of foreign aid it receives.

Westerners reflexively disdain patronage systems for their inefficiency and cronyism—labeling them “corrupt” as if by definition. Ms. Thomas believes such contempt to be unfair, and she marshals an impressive array of arguments and evidence to make her case. Government workers in poor countries, she notes, often live below the poverty line, which forces them to find additional jobs or to profit from their state-provided jobs. She quotes a public servant in the Congo who asks how, with a salary of less than $30 a month, government officials can “survive without accepting bribes.” Sometimes, she observes, state workers must in turn “bribe government officials in order to get paid.” She aptly notes that patronage politics prevailed throughout the world before the 19th century, at which time wealthy Western nations conducted protracted civil-service reforms.

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Ms. Thomas acknowledges that governments in poor countries can and should do better, but Western countries have done more harm than good, she says, by stigmatizing patronage as immoral and demanding criminal prosecution for malefactors—at times as a condition of further aid. If we wish to praise and reward, she argues, we should focus on the degrees to which a Third World government is inclusive and just in distributing wealth and providing services, rather than demanding that it govern as expansively and impartially as, say, Sweden’s national cabinet.

“Govern Like Us” is persuasive on many counts. Certainly the West has too often hurled accusations of corruption against foreign governments without due consideration of context and without an awareness of the unintended consequences of such charges. Taking an absolutist position against corruption and other manifestations of “bad governance”—such as the subordination of formal laws to the ruler’s discretion—has undermined Western efforts to bolster foreign allies. After years of fruitless attempts to work against patronage systems in Iraq and Afghanistan, the United States ended up working through such systems by bankrolling the patrons themselves; such a path proved the only way of subduing anti-American insurgents.

Some Western experts may fault Ms. Thomas for discounting the moral dimension of corruption, arguing that her thesis lets abysmal leaders off the hook. While a hungry policeman may have no choice but to confiscate a chicken, they will say, the ruling classes of poor nations do not go hungry, and they daily confront choices between advancing their narrow self-interest and promoting the public good.

That line of reasoning has considerable validity. Some national leaders and regional governors make certain that money allocated for, say, school textbooks is spent on school textbooks. But others use the money to enlarge their fleet of Mercedes sport-utility vehicles. A strong case can be made that the higher civic morality of leaders in such nations as South Korea, Oman, Chile, Singapore and Botswana explains why their governments work more justly and effectively than others of comparable size and resources—and why their economies do better, too. A nation’s ability to encourage entrepreneurship and investment depends to a substantial degree on whether its leaders are magnanimous enough to allow people other than their friends and relatives to amass wealth.

Ms. Thomas forswears moral relativism, asserting that she does believe poor nations would be better off if their governments looked more like ours. Her downplaying of morality, though, may provide ammunition to those who would exclude morality entirely from international development, such as multiculturalists who explain away third-world vices as the by-products of Western imperialism, and “rational choice” theorists who interpret corruption as a rational response to existing institutions.

Nevertheless, “Govern Like Us” delivers a thought-provoking and valuable reminder that sanctimonious insistence on moral perfection can be as self-defeating as moral indifference.


Mr. Moyar’s book about U.S. national security under President Obama, “Strategic Failure,” is due out in June.