Corruption, the 'Common Good' and the emergence of the 'Public Service Ethos' in western Europe in the nineteenth century

Rationale

Western Europe is widely regarded as a region where cultural and political changes in the modern era have led to an unusually high proportion of countries who are regularly rated highly for their standards in public life and governance and low tolerance of corrupt behaviour by administrators and officials. The 2018 Corruption Perception Index, produced by Transparency International, featured 12 western European countries in its top 20 'least corrupt countries'. This project intends to explore the regional and international influences on campaigns against corruption within western European civic life between 1820 and 1900. My initial research has revealed considerable communication between policy makers, administrators and contemporary commentators and journalists in the drive to counter corrupt behaviour by state bureaucrats in early nineteenth century Europe. This project aims to develop an interdisciplinary forum for intellectual exchange between researchers in nineteenth century European history, political scientists, policy-makers, think-tanks and lobby groups. Following a successful international symposium held in Oxford in January 2019, funded by the British Academy 'Rising Star' Engagement Award scheme, the project now seeks to hold similar events across Europe to promote further collaboration between academics and policy-makers to take on research challenges together, as well as to navigating the often divergent methodological traditions between historians and political scientists.

Research Context

Historians working on the campaigns against corruption in Britain have hitherto tended to focus on three issues: the campaign against 'old' (or political corruption) in Britain until 1832; the impact of the Northcote-Trevelyan report of February 1854; corruption and its elimination in local government at the end of the nineteenth century.

The concept of a 'public service ethos' in administration has only recently attracted historical attention, as previously, studies of public institutions merely emphasised the growing 'professionalism' of the public services in Britain in the nineteenth century, as if the behaviours required by public servants were value-free and uncontested. The process whereby atavistic and self-serving behaviours among individual public officers were replaced with what Frank Carr terms 'an intangible set of values' and John Girling calls 'the pursuit of virtue' remains significantly neglected in British, if not in European, historiography, however.

The political press and popular literature played a substantial role in the promotion of agreed standards of public behaviour at this time, however, and the growing culture of public service and its promotion can be analysed through a study of press and print culture, focusing on responses to corruption scandals in the early nineteenth century, while a study of mid-nineteenth century literature can provide evidence of how these cultural values became embedded into public and civic mentalities.

Two significant edited collections: S. Tiihonen (ed.) 'The History of corruption in central government' (Oxford, 2003) and R. Kroeze et al (eds.) 'Anticorruption in History: From Antiquity to the Modern Age' (Oxford, 2017) indicate that much work has already been done on the cultural reform of administrations at the national level, outside Britain, especially in Scandinavian countries, but that there has been little work on how intellectual, political and cultural exchange helps to account for a similar process of reform occurring across western Europe in this period. The need for scholars working on the historical problem of corruption and its alternatives to discuss the areas of common experience across the region and the evidence for contemporary study of other countries' policies and experiences is now overdue.

Corruption remains an endemic problem in the majority of modern societies, especially in those with little democratic tradition. This research network will provide a case-study of how one region (western Europe) created structures, protocols and systems that enabled the challenges of embezzlement, vested interest, class, ethnicity or family favouritism and institutional disinterest to be overcome. Though constantly evolving, corruption remains an obstacle to the effective implementation of public policy and administration of public services. As politics and the economy have become globalised, so have those practices that undermine fair, transparent decision-making and conduct.

The UK Government's Anti-Corruption Strategy 2017 to 2022 sets out a vision for increased prosperity, reduced threats to national security, and trusted national and international institutions. In many ways this complements and extends the European Union's 2014 Anti-Corruption Report which concluded that corruption deserves greater attention in all EU countries. This research network which considers to what extent a public service ethos was successfully embedded within public life in nineteenth century Europe, will offer insights for how modern anti-corruption policies can affect change in attitudes and practice.

Proposed Impacts:
- Improving the UK and EU's resilience to administrative corruption by identifying the key features of a robust public service ethos as it emerged in western Europe in the nineteenth century and the protocols which subsequently defended, enhanced and sustained it
- Feeding directly into public policy by offering historical cases studies of states, regions and individual administrative systems which successfully overcame corruption in the modern era
- Creating multi-stakeholder networks that generate new perspectives and solutions to reducing corrupt behaviour among public servants and civic bodies
- Delivering benefits to the quality of governance by helping to reduce instances of corruption in modern administrative systems.

These symposiums will enable politicians, administrators, lobbyists, journalists and academics to come together to identify key obstacles to and strategies towards a public service ethos in nineteenth western European administration. These will facilitate fruitful discussions as to the relevance of this history for present-day anti-corruption legislators and campaigners and establish academic and professional networks that cross professional and scholarly boundaries for the future analysis of a global issue which has remained persistent because the study of it largely remains confined within limiting intellectual boundaries.

Many of the academics who will host the symposiums outside UK participated in the EU's Anticorruption Policies Revisited: Global Trends and European Responses to the Challenge of Corruption (ANTICORRP) research project which started in March 2012 and ended in February 2017 (but which lacked expertise from scholars of nineteenth century British history). They will use the networks that this project will provide to enable politicians, administrators, lobbyists, journalists and academics to identify key obstacles to and strategies towards a public service ethos in nineteenth western European administration. The network will also engage the UK Parliament's Anti-corruption champion, the UK Parliament's All-Party Parliamentary Group on Corruption, the Scottish Parliament's Standards, Procedures and Public Appointments Committee, the Constitution Unit at University College, London, the EU Commission Expert Group on Corruption, the European Anti-Fraud Office (OLAF) the OECD Global Anti-corruption and Integrity Forum, the Council of Europe's Group of States against Corruption (GRECO) and the United National Global Compact Anti-corruption Working Group.