Big Men, Corruption, and Crime
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Big Men, Corruption, and Crime David B. Kanin Central Intelligence Agency, 1074 Mist Haven Terrace, Rockville, MD 20852, USA. E-mail: [email protected]
The persistence of corruption and organized crime in the Balkans has more to do with structural factors in the region’s geography, economy, and history than with a notional ‘transition’ to democracy and free markets. In this area — and others at the margins of the global economy — these problems are central aspects of existence, not temporary aberrations destined to disappear once ‘good governance’ and ‘rule of law’ set in. Economic marginality and fragmentation in the Balkans have created a tradition of ‘Big Men’, local notables who have the authority — and legitimacy — to control access to resources and power. Big Men also have a longstanding tradition of latching on to imperial authorities and foreign powers with which they have productive reciprocal relationships. Relations between the contemporary ‘international community’ and current Big Men in the Balkans reinforce earlier patterns — the assassination of Serbian Prime Minister Djindjic is best understood in this context. Mitigating these problems would involve privileging the need for a larger regional market at the expense of post-Yugoslav successor states, bypassing those states when money is doled out, focusing infrastructure projects on regional — not international — needs, and tolerating such robust, informal phenomena as the Arizona Market. International Politics (2003) 40, 491–526. doi:10.1057/palgrave.ip.8800038 Keywords: Balkans; authority; corruption; democratic transitions; good governance; organized crime
Introduction It has become a throwaway line to say that corruption and organized crime are serious problems — perhaps the most serious — in the Balkans. That ‘good governance’ and a clean set of laws, leaders, and judicial institutions are the answers to this problem also have become truisms. The following discussion considers ‘criminal’ activities as central to the social life of the region — and not just this region — and rejects the efficacy of democratic ideology and the slogan ‘rule of law’ in understanding or combating them. I analyze the relationship between geographic and economic marginality that has made the Balkans conducive to organized crime. The argument then connects these conditions to the history of interaction between nationalizing Balkan communities and succeeding versions of a ‘West’ in possession of the terms and resources of ‘modernity’. Concluding observations on approaches to
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mitigate the problems identified will follow a discussion of current conditions among the shards of the shattered Yugoslavia and within the burgeoning Albanian social universe. A thread running through this story is the dominance of ‘Big Men’, the heads of family and patronage systems who continue to dominate the region and to co-opt international support by speaking the language of modernity and offering promises of stability and ‘reform’. These Big
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