...human rights, adhere to the rule of law and invest in their people by improving health care systems and schools." Bush could hardly have come up with more brutally ironic statement if he had intended it, since each of the elements he identified for action by Arab governments can be found the humanitarian crisis created by the Anglo-American coalition in Iraq. Following earlier work on Anglo-American corruption in the Iraqi reconstruction economy, where it was argued that the corruption of the reconstruction economy provided momentum to the transformation of the economic order (Whyte, 2007), this article explores the centrality of a counter-corruption mobilization to this process.

Historically, the terms "corruption" and economic backwardness (as opposed to the perceived civilized and enlightened values of "fairness," "openness," and "transparency") have typically featured in imperialist narratives that invoke the primitiveness of less-developed states (Shore and Haller, 2005). The British Empire in particular claimed altruism and the pursuit of virtue as its rationale for colonial domination (Chomsky, :2004). In colonial British history, Arab backwardness revolved around the universal mythology of "primitive, warring tribes," and, perhaps more enduringly, around inherent tendencies of thievery, lack of trustworthiness, and deception. The Arab way of trading, doing business, etc., was, in British colonial mythology, plagued by corruption, cheating, and subterfuge; in other words, Arabs never play by the rules--of Western liberal markets, that is (Bayley, 1989). The cultivation of this stereotype--the mobilization of the empire against Arab corruption--was historically connected to the fierce competition between British and Arab traders for the domination of trading routes in the Middle East and Africa. It should therefore be understood as an ideological weapon in the struggle for the moral high ground as the British Empire sought to triumph over its commercial competition.

Defining Corruption, Defining Order

The brief historical discussion rehearsed above reinforces the need to recognize that corruption is a culturally mediated term (Carrier, 1997). Those narratives also alert us to the possibility that counter-corruption campaigns can imply something more than the eradication of corruption in business and political life per se. According to Sampson (2005:110), the world of anti-corruption can be understood as a "stage in which moral projects are intertwined with money and power." Indeed, contemporary counter-corruption programs are typically supportive of a neoliberal global order, endorsed and imposed by international institutions such as the World Bank and the United Nations Development Program (Ibid.; see also Le Billon, 2005). For the IFIs, (1) anti-corruption measures are commonly used as a precondition of grant aid, debt relief, or of membership in international bodies.

To fully understand the ideological force of contemporary counter-corruption discourse and practice, it is necessary to understand how a particular way of thinking about corruption is inscribed into the working definitions used by the U.N. and the IFIs, and typically by NGOs such as Transparency International. There are important differences across those definitions. (2) Yet if there is one common characteristic across NGO, U.N., and IFI definitions, it is that corrupt acts are committed for the private gain of individuals in conflict with the public interest. Thus, corruption is committed "for the official himself or herself or another person or entity," (3) and typically involves "public officials acting in the best interest of private concerns (their own or those of others) regardless of, or against, the public interest." (4)

Two assumptions are common to those standard definitions of corruption. The first is that the constitutional segregation between public and private spheres forms the foundation of the social order. In those definitions, the violation of the formal distinction between the public and private sectors is the starting point in definitions of corruption (Shore and Hailer, 2005). This liberal conception of the state erects an invisible barrier between the private sphere of capital accumulation and state institutions. This barrier supports the idea that states are granted the role of protecting public interest, and markets the role of promoting private accumulation of capital via systems of open exchange. The second assumption is that contradictions between public and private interest arise from (corrupt) relationships between individuals or groups of individuals. Therefore, a kind of "methodological individualism" overshadows debates on corruption, with perpetrators typically characterized as a criminal conspiracy.

The combined effect of those assumptions is that corruption is understood as an aberration, a departure from the way economic systems are supposed to work. Because it constitutes a violation between what are portrayed as "naturally" separate spheres of public and private, and because it normally involves a conspiracy of elites, "corruption" is typically conceptualized as a departure from the normal path of orderly economic progress. Standard definitions of corruption therefore set out a pathological view of economic development that assumes that there is a normal, natural way to progress, and that any deviation from this path to progress is abnormal. The normal path of progress for the IFIs, for U.N. agencies, and for an increasing number of NGOs is the universal adoption of neoliberal economic principles: privatization of infrastructure, few monetary controls, low levels of subsidy in manufacturing industries, limits upon trade protections, etc. Combating corruption, as part of this broader panoply of policies, is therefore integral to a G8/IMF/World Bank-led neoliberal agenda (Brown and Cloke, 2004; Marquette, 2001).

For the World Bank, "state capture" is the concept used to explain the dominant mechanisms that produce corruption (World Bank, 2000; on the relationship between neoliberalism and state capture theory, see Whyte, 2004). When the state is "captured" by a powerful elite, competition in the private sector is constrained. Relatedly, IMF discussions of corruption tend to focus on "rent-seeking" activity (regulatory measures that seek some form of taxation or economic conditions imposed by the state upon private actors). The IMF seeks to combat corruption by encouraging the improved management of public resources through reforms to public-sector institutions and by "supporting the development and maintenance of a transparent and stable economic and regulatory...

NOTE: All illustrations and photos have been removed from this article.



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