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14 Conn. J. Int'l L. 509 (1999)
The Inevitable Corruption of Transition

handle is hein.journals/conjil14 and id is 515 raw text is: THE INEVITABLE CORRUPTION OF TRANSITION Kim Lane Scheppele* Ne poiman - ne vor - Russian proverb. (Literally: Until one is caught, one is not a thief.) Innocent until proven guilty - English translation.' I. INTRODUCTION The difficulties of developing transparent democratic institutions and efficient free markets in Eastern Europe2 show how common ideas can turn into a diversity of practices. It is not enough for everyone to understand the ideas in order for complex institutions to be reproduced. One also needs a certain amount of social and normative infrastructure to sustain an idea in practice as it moves from one context to another. In particular, the idea of and practices surrounding corruption generate a great deal of cross-cultural confusion. As the Cold War has further cooled, Western advisors and investors going into the former Soviet empire have been outraged by the degree of corruption going on in * Professor of Law and Sociology, University of Pennsylvania; Senior Visiting Scholar, National Constitution Center, Philadelphia PA; Recurring Visiting Professor, Central European University, Budapest. Much of the material reported in this essay was collected while the author was doing research on legal consciousness in Hungary under grants # SBR-9411889 and # SBR-9514174 from the (American) National Science Foundation Law and Social Science Program. The author would like to thank Serguei Oushakine for providing wise advise and good examples, Helen Hartnell for getting me into this subject in the first place, Joel Paul for his inspiration and encouragement, my Hungarian friends who found me a place in their networks, and the enthusiastic participants in the conference on political corruption for a lot to think about. 1. 2001 RUSSIAN AND ENGLISH IDIOMS 32 (Agnes Arany-Makkai ed., 1997). I am indebted to Serguei Oushakine for the literal translation and for calling my attention to this proverb in the first place. 2. 1 will use the term Eastern Europe here to refer both to Central and Eastern Europe as well as to the former Soviet Union. There are huge differences within and between these regions, however, so I will try to specify countries and social locations more precisely as I go along. I will also use the West rather generally as well to refer to North America and Western Europe, though there is similar diversity within that category too. The point in the contrast between East and West is to mark the differences, broadly speaking, between those countries that have tried the Soviet experiment and those that have tried the democratic/market one. As I hope to show, however, there are more parallels in current practices than sometime meets the (Western) eye.

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