Cpr - Repatriation detention centers

Islands. Spaces of education and civil disobedience

Cpr - Repatriation detention centers

Islands. Spaces of education and civil disobedience

The corruption that exists and what will be

Corrupting means breaking that bond of trust that animates all social relationships. Understanding these practices is the first step to understanding how the country has changed and knowing how to act in post-coronavirus reconstruction

Alberto Vannucci Professor of Political Science, University of Pisa

"The hell of the living is not something that will be; if there is one, it is the one that is already here, the hell that we inhabit every day, that we form by being together." Thus Italo Calvino in Invisible Cities, a dutiful homage to the column that hosts this contribution, captures a profound aspect of the topic discussed. The practice of corruption in fact constitutes a dimension of that desolate "hell that we live in every day, that we form by being together". It manifests itself when something insinuating, almost always imperceptible, corrodes and finally "breaks" the bond of trust that animates all social relationships, allowing us to attribute meaning and value to them. Etymology allows us to grasp the root of the concept: the Latin term corruptio is composed of con and rumpere to break, that is, to break something that was previously united: trust on the one hand, responsibility on the other. Understanding which social practices are forms of corruption is a necessary first step.

What are we talking about when we talk about corruption

Let's clear up an initial misunderstanding. The public discourse on corruption is inexorably associated with the events of some political exponent or official involved or convicted following judicial investigations. In the collective imagination, an overlap is thus created between the reality of corruption and the violation of the penal code, which is followed by the repressive action of the State. The judicial demonstration of criminal responsibility turns into the litmus test of the existence of corruption. This allows more or less excellent defendants who have been acquitted or acquitted (or even discharged) to be considered publicly immune from any form of liability.

Understanding and remedying this political-judicial short circuit requires a broadening of perspective. According to the National Anti-Corruption Authority, corruption occurs in all those "situations in which, in the course of administrative activity, there is evidence of abuse by a person of the power entrusted to him in order to obtain private advantages. The relevant situations are broader than the criminal case (...) and are such as to include (...) also situations in which - regardless of the criminal relevance - a malfunctioning of the administration is highlighted". Having gone almost unnoticed, in reality this "administrative" redefinition of a broader notion of corruption represented at a conceptual level a true Copernican revolution, which however is still slow to translate into a corresponding cultural evolution of administrative policies and practices.

Two passages deserve further investigation. The first is the question of the public or private identity of the corrupt person. The practice of corruption tends to be associated above all with politicians and public officials, perhaps because their involvement, having to do with the res publica, is more easily recognizable and a source of indignation. But corruption creates some distortion (or "abuse") even in relationships between private parties. And the toxic consequences of the many "betrayals of trust" observable in social or market relations are just as deplorable and harmful as those observable in the public apparatus.

The second point is equally significant. The notion of "abuse" of delegated power lends itself to multiple and conflicting interpretations. Consequently, both the perimeter of the conduct attributable to manifestations of corruption becomes variable, as does the identity of the actors who - alongside the judiciary - can assume the responsibility of evaluating, judging and possibly punishing those deviant conducts. From the icy rigor of laws, to the incandescent matter of morality, passing through all the intermediate nuances: associated with cultural values, collective interests, common goods, the very notion of corruption fragments and becomes a social construction, a matter of divergences, contrasts and debate, it becomes a dialectical weapon, usable in political confrontation and confrontation.

The Anac's challenge: mapping corruption in Italy

The metamorphoses of Italian corruption

“The management of Sicilian healthcare public procurement appears to be affected by systemic corruption with the involvement, with different tasks and roles, of unfaithful public officials and managers, fixers and unscrupulous entrepreneurs willing to do anything to win million-dollar contracts”: this is the description offered by the judges of the criminal network that led in May 2020 to the arrest of two senior Sicilian managers, one of whom was commissioner for the Covid-19 emergency. "You buy me with money... by showing me that you respect your commitments. Except for me to tell you that it is a given... that it is the net five of the contracts of large plants", so in 2018 - six years after the Severino law and the establishment of the Anti-corruption Authority - bribes continue to be negotiated. A tenacious balance, crystallized in networks of systemic corruption, especially in the realm of so-called grand corruption, that of big business and large-scale works, urban planning speculation and millionaire tax disputes.

Contrary to a widespread self-denigrating representation, in Italy there seems to be - today as yesterday - a relatively modest level of petty corruption: public employees rarely ask for money or other types of favors to do (or not do, if they carry out control functions) their work in dealing with ordinary citizens - although there are exceptions. The latest Eurobarometer survey, in 2017, certifies that only 4 percent of Italian citizens have seen or experienced an episode of corruption in the last year, a figure far below the European average, and only 7 percent of citizens personally know someone who takes bribes - the lowest percentage among European Union countries. More than in everyday life, the deep roots of endemic corruption seem to sink into the soil where the economic, political and professional elite of the country is formed, where the values ​​of the ruling class are shaped.

The evidence obtainable from the main cases of corruption, from "Clean Hands" to the present day, indicates the presence of coordination mechanisms, sometimes very sophisticated. There are unwritten rules, but of shared knowledge and acceptance, "rules of conduct", which in the "grey zone" of criminal activities bind together politicians, officials, entrepreneurs, professionals, fixers, criminal actors. An arrested politician spoke of a “corruption etiquette”.

Compared to the situation photographed by "Clean Hands", over time, however, new balances of power and authority have consolidated. In the 1990s it was discovered that the last instance of "government" of hidden exchanges was given by a few consolidated centers of power, the secretariats of the main parties, capable of ensuring selective access to public resources to a restricted circle of politically similar entrepreneurs, businesses and cooperatives. That "party-centric" structure of regulation of the corruption market did not withstand the blow of judicial investigations: in the absence of a recognized center of gravity of party authority, the reality of grand corruption, still endemic, has become jagged and polycentric. The actors who intercept the demand for protection of hidden exchanges have multiplied: fixers (in the Expo scandal), managers of consortia of private companies (in the MOSE bribes), senior ministerial executives (in the so-called Civil Protection clique), and of course criminal organizations such as "Mafia Capital", which had made the management of widespread corruption in the Capitoline administration its core business.

At least since the time of the "table", the mechanism with which the emissaries of the Corleonese mafia scientifically organized the division of bribes and contracts in Sicily since the 1980s, we have known that the mafias are an extremely robust guarantor of illicit exchanges, thanks to the application of their intimidating force.

Concern about the growing role that the mafias will be able to carve out for themselves in entrepreneurial and financial activities in the post-pandemic emergency phase should start from this elementary premise: the criminal infiltration force is essentially and almost exclusively based on collusive and corruptive strategies, based on money or votes. Mafias find in public administrations and economic-financial systems characterized by pervasive forms of corruption a magnet for their penetration into new territories and markets, both as corrupting agents and as guarantors of hidden exchanges. Suffice it to recall the story that emerged in the "Aemilia" judicial investigation of 2015: an Emilian entrepreneur, feeling cheated by an intermediary in the advance payment of a bribe of 1.3 million euros aimed at winning a tender in Lombardy, entrusted himself to an 'Ndrangheta group to resolve in his favor - with the hasty methods typical of the criminal group - the dispute that had arisen.

Coronavirus, bribes also have lethal effects on sick people

Post Covid reconstruction and corruption: what to do and what not to do?

Any credible fight against corruption requires a "long-term" commitment, a forward-looking view. A 2017 book by Eric Uslaner demonstrates how "the historical roots of corruption" lie above all in the education levels found over a century and a half ago. The countries that invested in mass education in those years, generating a more educated and active citizenry, started a virtuous circle of civic participation which over time favored the selection of responsible rulers, ensuring high standards of transparency and integrity in the management of public affairs. Good governance is the best safeguard against corruption, understood as abuse of power and betrayal of trust, not only and not always as a crime.

In Italy, the greatest common denominator of all interventions to combat corruption, from law 190 of 2012 to law 3 of 2019, the so-called "corruption sweeper", has been the short-sighted prospect of tightening penalties. On the one hand, the promoters relied on the announcement effect of the measures, generating expectations which, if disappointed, will end up fueling further detachment and disenchantment. The weapon of criminal law enforcement suffers from an insurmountable limit: it neglects the countless other "legitimate" abuses of public power - up to the forms of "legalized corruption", in which the laws are not violated, but bent to the advantage of corrupt oligarchies - which generate maladministration and mistrust.

Other alarm bells are ringing deafeningly. In the public debate on the needs of post-coronavirus economic and social reconstruction, a sort of emergency mantra has consolidated which has its obsessive term of reference in the "Genoa bridge model". The large amount of public investments that should favor the "restart" should be governed according to an extraordinary management model, in derogation of all the rules and provisions in force. In procurement, in particular, a return to extraordinary tender management procedures is called for, identical to those used by the so-called Civil Protection "clique".

Italian history in recent decades has taught us that a similar type of public choice, the first-born daughter of any real or fictitious emergency, is inherently criminogenic, the main road of corruption and mafia infiltration. Its predictable outcome is public works, supplies and services of poor quality assigned at exorbitant prices to entrepreneurs well connected in the right circles, in the antechambers of politicians and high officials, in local potentates or business committees, in Masonic lodges or other sheltered circles. Paradoxically, the ideology underlying this "emergency culture" flaunts the contrast between the dullness of bureaucracy and the streamlined nature of "doing". However, we know that in the desertification of ordinary rules, the first to take the field have always been the most serious and competent professionals of illegality, better for them if backed by mafia protectors.

Like any critical situation, the post-pandemic emergency also opens a window of opportunity. A different post-emergency administrative management is possible, as long as it is inspired by the desirable pillars of substantial corruption prevention:

complete transparency of all public spending and purchases;

use of those already existing procedures and rules - including those of the reviled procurement code - which already authorize a drastic streamlining in case of urgency, without abdicating control;

valorization and extension of those "good practices", including collaborative supervision, which in 2014 allowed Anac to straighten out the polluted contracts of the Expo during construction;

strengthening of subsequent controls on the final quality of works, services and performances;

massive injection of technical professional skills into public administration (engineers, computer scientists, statisticians, economists, business experts, etc.), which act as a counterweight to the legal-formalistic culture that dominates today;

strengthening and extending tools for widespread prevention and social control of abuses of power, such as monitoring and civic access.

Moreover, to return to Calvino's Invisible Cities, in the face of hell (of corruption): "There are two ways to not suffer from it. The first is easy for many: to accept hell and become part of it to the point of no longer seeing it. The second is risky and requires continuous attention and learning: seeking and knowing how to recognize who and what, in the midst of hell, is not hell, and making it last, and giving it space".

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Ferrante L. and Vannucci A., Anti-corruption pop, Turin, Edizioni Gruppo Abele, 2017

Picci, L. and Vannucci A., Zen and the art of fighting corruption, Milan, Altreconomia, 2018;

Sciarrone, R. (ed.), Politics and corruption, Rome, Donzelli, 2017;

Vannucci, A., Atlas of corruption, Turin, Edizioni Gruppo Abele, 2012.