Fertile ground for state-related felony

Neil Barnett

Neil Barnett says an upsurge of state intervention to stimulate recession-hit economies – especially the former communist ones – will offer rich pickings for criminals

If fraud in the formerly red-blooded economies of the Anglo-Saxon world is primarily targeted at private-sector investors, then in the more dirigiste economies of Europe, it can be said that the state is both the target and the regular partner of the fraudster.

The state’s large role in the economy doubtless plays a part, as does the moral ambiguity of some southerly and easterly European cultures, where being smart can be valued more than being straight – and rascals are repeatedly re-elected to power. The functionary in his drab office asks, quite reasonably, ‘If the guys at the top are playing the game, why shouldn’t I?’ Thus begins a partnership between officials and fraudsters at the expense of the general public.

In central and eastern Europe, the moral component is more complex. It would be crass to suggest that Romanians or Russians are inherently more prone to crime than Spaniards or Belgians, but their countries’ sorry histories provide fertile ground for felony. Centuries of despotic rule stymied the development of a civic culture of participation and service. Then communist regimes worked to undermine church, family and ‘bourgeois morality’, while the apparat lived like aristocrats. As a result, the populace took the view that only a fool didn’t cheat the system – be it stealing iron bars from the factory or spending shifts drinking vodka and snoozing in a cupboard. Come the fall of communism after 1989, the man in the street was disorientated, while the old party and secret-police cadres seized the opportunity to snatch ownership of state assets, swapping political power for economic power. The outcome across the former communist block is that many people in positions of power – judges, bureaucrats, politicians, journalists – take a charitable view of white-collar misdeeds, especially if they can share in the proceeds. The man on the Plovdiv omnibus, for his part, takes a fatalist view: they always stole, they always will, so what? Add in an understandable desire across society to make up the prosperity gap sooner rather than later and the soil is ripe for fraud.

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