Fighting Corruption in Eastern Europe: A Multilevel Perspective

Anti-corruption programmes, projects and campaigns have come to constitute an essential aspect of good governance promotion over the last two decades. The post-communist countries in Eastern Europe have presented one of the first key targets of transnational anti-corruption efforts, and indeed most of these countries have shown an impressive record of respective measures. Yet path-breaking policy developments have been rather recent in many Eastern European countries, such as new anti-corruption drives in Poland in 2002, in Ukraine in 2005, or in Hungary in 2007. What do we know about the complex interplay between the international and domestic domains in this policy field and geographic region? This book provides in-depth and comparative insights about this interplay, with a particular focus on the involvement of domestic social movements, governmental political machines and international legal mechanisms. We find that, on all three levels of analysis, political and material interests of relevant actors are complemented and at times contradicted by normative claims. Moreover, at the interfaces of the three levels, coincidental and spontaneous developments have largely outweighed systematic implementation and coordination of appropriate anti-corruption strategies. This book was originally published as special issue of Global Crime.