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

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

RationaleWestern 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 ContextHistorians 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.